Bordering and Governmentality Around the Greek Islands 3031085884, 9783031085888

Table of contents :
Contents
1 My Own Journey (Instead of Introduction)
The Bench
My Own Journey from ‘Mobile Ethnography’ to a ‘Politics of Location’
Fiction as a Method
References
2 Mapping Out the Hotspot
Waiting for the ‘Flow’
The Prisoner of the Route
Hotspotization
The Remapping of the Border Islands
“We Run to the Border When the Whole City Runs”
Conclusion
References
3 Setting the Scene of the Hotspot
From Athens
From Lesvos
“I Am the Camp”
The Evicted Self
Conclusion
References
4 Entering the Hotspot
The ‘Pakistani Issue’
“We Are not Refugees; We Are Economic Migrants!”
The EU–Turkey Deal: Entering the Hotspot
Conclusion
References
5 Refusing the Hotspot
The Sexualized Landscape of the ‘Refugee Crisis’
Painful Translations
The Refugee-Volunteer
The Researcher-Volunteer
Translation and the Erotic: My Departure and Return to Lesvos
Conclusion: Our Departure from Lesvos
References
6 Exiting the Hotspot
‘Syrian refugees’ Entering and Exiting from the ‘Field’
The Relocation Program
From the ‘Unruly Subject’ at the Border to the ‘Beneficiary’ of the Relocation Program
From the Border (Lesvos) to Athens, from Athens to the Border (Idomeni) and Back
At Piraeus Port
The Security Interview
At the IOM Office in Athens: “We saw so many cheeses”
Conclusion
References
7 Embodying the Hotspot
Where are the Women/Where am I?
Women Engaged/Encaged
Escaping Through the Protest
The Cramped House
At Moria’s Gate
Inside the Hotspot: The Potentially Pregnant Woman
‘Floating deportation’
On the Ferry from Samos to Lesvos: Embodying the Violence
No, I will not get Engaged
“Self-harm”
Harmful Agency
Conclusion
References
8 Returning to the Hotspot
A ferry to nowhere
To Which Organization Do You Belong?
The Self-Settled Migrant
Translating Into/Transit: The Cultural Mediator
“I am an economic migrant”
Precarious Translations
Smoking Weed
From a Homelessness in/to Detention: The Pandemic Crisis
Detention Within Detention
Encaged agency
Incomplete Conclusion/Incomplete Return
References
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

MOBILITY & POLITICS SERIES EDITORS: MARTIN GEIGER NICOLA PIPER · PARVATI RAGHURAM

Bordering and Governmentality Around the Greek Islands Aila Spathopoulou

Mobility & Politics

Series Editors Martin Geiger, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada Nicola Piper, School of Law, Queen Mary University of London, London, UK Parvati Raghuram, Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

Editorial Board Tendayi Bloom, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK Michael Collyer, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK Charles Heller, Graduate Institute, Geneva, Switzerland Elaine Ho, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore Shadia Husseini de Araújo, University of Brasília, Brasília, Brazil Alison Mountz, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada Linda Oucho, African Migration and Development Policy Centre, Nairobi, Kenya Marta Pachocka, SGH Warsaw School of Economics, Warsaw, Poland Antoine Pécoud, Université Sorbonne Paris Nord, Villetaneuse, France Shahamak Rezaei, University of Roskilde, Roskilde, Denmark Sergey Ryazantsev, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia Carlos Sandoval García, University of Costa Rica, San José, Costa Rica Everita Silina, The New School, New York, NY, USA Rachel Simon-Kumar, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand William Walters, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada

Mobility & Politics Series Editors Martin Geiger, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada Nicola Piper, Queen Mary University of London, UK Parvati Raghuram, Open University, Milton Keynes, UK Global Advisory Board Tendayi Bloom, University of Birmingham, UK Michael Collyer, Sussex University, UK Charles Heller, Geneva Graduate Institute, Switzerland Elaine Ho, National University of Singapore Shadia Husseini de Araújo, University of Brasília, Brazil Alison Mountz, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada Linda Oucho, African Migration and Development Policy Centre, Nairobi, Kenya Marta Pachocka, SGH Warsaw School of Economics, Poland Antoine Pécoud, Sorbonne University Paris Nord, France Shahamak Rezaei, University of Roskilde, Denmark Sergey Ryazantsev, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia Carlos Sandoval García, University of Costa Rica Everita Silina, The New School, New York, USA Rachel Simon-Kumar, University of Auckland, New Zealand William Walters, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada Human mobility, whatever its scale, is often controversial. Hence it carries with it the potential for politics. A core feature of mobility politics is the tension between the desire to maximise the social and economic benefits of migration and pressures to restrict movement. Transnational communities, global instability, advances in transportation and communication, and concepts of ‘smart borders’ and ‘migration management’ are just a few of the phenomena transforming the landscape of migration today. The tension between openness and restriction raises important questions about how different types of policy and politics come to life and influence mobility. Mobility & Politics invites original, theoretically and empirically informed studies for academic and policy-oriented debates. Authors examine issues such as refugees and displacement, migration and citizenship, security and cross-border movements, (post-)colonialism and mobility, and transnational movements and cosmopolitics. This series is indexed in Scopus.

Aila Spathopoulou

Bordering and Governmentality Around the Greek Islands

Aila Spathopoulou Department of Geography Durham University Durham, UK

ISSN 2731-3867 ISSN 2731-3875 (electronic) Mobility & Politics ISBN 978-3-031-08588-8 ISBN 978-3-031-08589-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08589-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1

1

My Own Journey (Instead of Introduction)

2

Mapping Out the Hotspot

29

3

Setting the Scene of the Hotspot

49

4

Entering the Hotspot

71

5

Refusing the Hotspot

87

6

Exiting the Hotspot

107

7

Embodying the Hotspot

125

8

Returning to the Hotspot

161

Bibliography

213

Index

227

v

CHAPTER 1

My Own Journey (Instead of Introduction)

The Bench At the end of June 2020, I was searching for Ege1 in Exarchia, a neighbourhood in the centre of Athens known in the past as a self-governing and anarchist space but in the last years has turned into one of the most highly policed neighbourhoods of Athens, where city sweeps through racial profiling take place daily. A month earlier, on the 4th of May 2020, the first lockdown for the prevention of the spread of Covid-19 in Greece was lifted for the general population in the country. As a Greek citizen, therefore, I was able to exit my house and wander the streets and search for him. For some time, Ege did not have a phone, as he had sold his previous ones. Ege had been homeless since October 2019, living in a squat in Exarchia that would eventually be evicted, then in a tent on a hill behind Exarchia where several homeless people racialized as migrants lived and that was, also, evicted by the police in the summer of 2020. Ege’s last home before his arrest and detention by the police on the 21st of June 2020, was a bench on a side street just off Exarchia square. On that bench he slept, ate his meals, smoked and sold drugs; on that bench, 1 Ege in the Turkish language means ‘Aegean’ in English or ‘Aιγα´ιo’ in the Greek language. I purposely choose this fictious name because of its symbolic connotations; this is where the ‘liquid border’ is located, where immeasurable violence is performed but, also, where the ‘East’ and the ‘West’ connect. It is also where my research is located…

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Spathopoulou, Bordering and Governmentality Around the Greek Islands, Mobility & Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08589-5_1

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he lived and earned his living. Although I visited him frequently during this time, I don’t think we ever sat together on that bench. If for Ege it was his home for me the bench had become a border, a border that separated us, even before he was arrested and detained in the pre-removal centre of Amygdaleza whose walls and barbed wire kept us physically apart. Was it the fear of the police, the smell of drugs, the movements of the other ‘drug dealers’, Ege’s own lost gaze, or the fact that I did not want to buy, and smoke weed, or the fear at the possibility of contracting the Covid-19 virus if I was to sit too close, that I refused to sit with Ege on that bench, that I refused to make that bench my home, our home…? This book is about routes and homes, a route that becomes a home, a home that turns into a prison, a bench that becomes our home and eventually a border where we remain fixed and separated from those we love. It is about relationships with and separations from subjects whose experience is shaped by frictions and violence, by struggles to appropriate mobility, by diversion of routes and by the denial of mobility, during a time that spans from the summer of 2015 until the summer of 2020. In these five years, our lives had been governed (and continue to be governed during the time of this writing) through multiple crises. As we have observed with my mentors and collaborators at the Feminist Autonomous Centre for Research in Athens (FAC Research)2 “in 2015 following the financial crisis in 2011 through which Greece was constructed as the disobedient pariah of Europe, reinforcing the polarity between the European centre and the periphery, the European refugee crisis represented by myriad photographs of people in boats arriving at the island of Lesvos appears on the scene” (Carastathis et al. 2020, p. 9). As a response to the ‘refugee crisis’, the hotspot approach was presented by the European Commission in May 2015, as part of a larger policy push termed the “European Agenda on Migration” (EC 2015a). Five registration and identification centres started operating in Greece, on the islands of Lesvos, Chios, Samos, Leros and Kos that ‘set the stage’ for the development of the ‘refugee crisis’ and particularly for the distinction between ‘refugees’ and ‘economic migrants’ that shaped the ‘script’ of the crisis since 2015. The hotspot approach was presented by the European Commission in May 2015, as part of a larger policy push termed the “European

2 https://feministresearch.org/.

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Agenda on Migration” (EC 2015a). The Agenda mandates the European Asylum Support Office (EASO), Frontex and Europol to collaborate “on the ground with frontline Member States to swiftly identify, register and fingerprint incoming migrants” (EC 2015b), dividing those eligible to apply for asylum from those ineligible, rendered deportable. Further, Europol and Eurojust are to assist the “host” Member State in the dismantling of “smuggling and trafficking networks” (EC 2015b). The hotspot approach is, ultimately, tied to the implementation of the EU– Turkey Deal3 on the 20th of March 2016, that effectively turned the ‘hotspot islands’ into prison islands and deportation sites for the people on the move. The chapters of this book and the experiences that they narrate are structured around what Martina Tazzioli (2018) refers to as a “split temporality, formed by a “before” and an “after” the Deal” (p. 19). Four years later, in October 2019, Greek Prime Minister Konstantinos Mitsotakis of the ruling right-wing New Democracy party announces to the population that what Greece is dealing with is no longer a refugee crisis but a migration crisis, claiming that the majority of the population that is entering Greece have the profile of an economic migrant and not that of a refugee (see also Spathopoulou and Tazzioli 2021). As we have pointed out at the Feminist Autonomous Centre for Research in Athens, “during this time, the construction of new closed detention centres on ‘hotspot’ islands was announced; the imposition of a new asylum law 3 With the implementation of the EU–Turkey Deal (otherwise known as the EU– Turkey Statement and Action Plan or the EU–Turkey Agreement) on 20th of March 2016, all migrants arriving on the border islands are geographically restricted to the five hotspot islands. The Deal comprises several action points, including: (1) the return to Turkey of all asylum seekers arriving on the Greek islands after the Deal’s date of implementation; (2) the resettlement of 1 Syrian in the EU for every Syrian returned to Turkey; (3) the disbursement of e6 billion from the EU to Turkey; (4) the lifting of visa requirements for Turkish citizens by the end of 2016; and (4) the re-energisation and acceleration of the EU Accession Process for Turkey. The deal hence erects a temporal border between those designated ‘refugees’ or ‘newcomers’, arrived post-2015, and those referred to as ‘migrants’, who have been living for many years or were even born in Greece, but have been denied asylum, permanent residency, or citizenship. See: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/legislative-train/theme-towards-a-new-policy-on-mig ration/file-eu-turkey-statement-action-pla Researchers that happened to be on the hotspot islands when the deal was put into force observed how the gates of the hotspot were locked or closed (Tazzioli 2016; Antonakaki et al. 2016; Spathopoulou 2016). “Migrants were free to leave the centers but a second order of restriction of movement barred them from leaving the islands, while the centers themselves remained largely inaccessible for outside observers, such as journalists, NGOs or researchers” (Antonakaki et al. 2016).

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that among other things violates one’s very right to apply for asylum in Greece; evictions of squats in Athens and other urban centres, and the transportation of people to isolated and segregated camps; evictions of recognized refugees from housing by the state and UNHCR, the IOM leading people to ‘self-deportation’; incessant stop and search procedures through racial profiling on the islands and in urban centres; daily more deaths in the Aegean sea; an increased criminalization of solidarity and mobility; blood stains marking the ‘Balkan route’, through which in 2015 the ‘March of Hope’ took place”.4 In March 2020, “a ‘state of emergency’ declared by the Greek government, suspended asylum processes for newly arriving people for one month, invoking article 78.3 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union”. Subsequently, since March 2020, the Greek authorities have engaged in an ongoing practice of systematic and violent collective expulsions, targeting specifically unregistered migrants (Legal Centre Lesvos 2022). Ege’s homelessness coincided with the outbreak of yet another crisis that emerged in Greece in March 2020; the global Covid-19 pandemic crisis that “has exacerbated the negative effects of the previous declared crises” (Carastathis et al. 2020, p. 9). Racial profiling and criminalization of people racialized as migrants by police in the urban centres had intensified under the pretext of pandemic controls (see Legal Centre Lesvos 2021).5 Alongside pushbacks which have become the modus operandi of ‘migration management’ on the Aegean and Evros Greek–Turkish borders (Legal Centre Lesvos 2020)6 as well as ‘push-offs’ from the shores and into the sea on what migrants have referred to as floating tents (The New Humanitarian 2020), various changes to the prevailing asylum legislation and prolonged delays in registering people as asylum seekers due to health quarantines (see Legal Centre Lesvos above reports) are pushing more and more people out of the asylum system or denying them the right to even apply for asylum. The pandemic was tied to an increased exclusion of people on the move from the asylum procedure and to several changes in the laws governing the asylum procedure (governed 4 https://feministresearch.org/mobility/. 5 http://legalcentrelesvos.org/2021/04/13/legal-centre-lesvos-quarterly-newsletter-

january-march-2021/. 6 http://legalcentrelesvos.org/2020/07/13/press-release-new-legal-centre-lesvos-rep ort-details-collective-expulsions-in-the-aegean-sea/.

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by Greek Laws 4375/2016, 4636/2019, 4686/2020, 4825/2021) in Greece, which had a detrimental effect on people seeking asylum rights. On 7 June 2020, a Joint Ministerial Decision was published referring to the establishment of a National List of Safe Third Countries with the inclusion of Turkey as safe third country for asylum-seekers from Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Somalia, countries from which the majority of the people arriving on the islands come from. Following the publication of the Joint Ministerial Decision, on 8 June, the Regional Asylum office in Lesvos started conducting asylum interviews with the asylum-seekers on admissibility grounds, denying them the right to apply for asylum in Greece and rendering them deportable to Turkey, even if actual deportations to Turkey (except in the form of push-backs) were not taking place since the outbreak of the pandemic. In this way, people on the move found themselves detained on the island in a situation of legal uncertainty, unable to move on and access any form of rights and protection. This speaks of what Alison Mountz (2020) has discussed as a global phenomenon as the ‘death of asylum’. Regarding these developments, the Greek minister of migration Notis Mitarakis refers to a success story around the ‘dramatic decrease’ in refugee/migrant arrivals versus an increase in departures and returns (Mitarakis 2020, 2021).7 According to the hegemonic narrative, the ‘refugee/migration crisis’ has been resolved, the Greek government is gaining control, as neither refugees nor migrants are arriving; they are just departing (Mitarakis 2020).8 In relation to the above-bordered reality (Spathopoulou and Carastathis 2020), the main argument that I put forward in this book is that the Hotspot Approach is not just about the operation of certain EU institutions on the five islands at Greece’s exterior border, nor do these operations exclusively concern the identification, registration, fingerprinting and sorting out of newly arriving migrants. Rather, beyond the material reality of institutional operations conducted by Frontex, EASO, Europol and Eurodac in coordination with Greek authorities and other member states (but also with Turkey, other regional allies, and NATO), the hotspot is constitutive of an approach through which people are separated from one another according to categories that get reified

7 https://www.stonisi.gr/post/18509/to-metanasteytiko-shmera-den-apotelei-to-pro vlhma-poy-apoteloyse-video. 8 https://www.mitarakis.gr/press/88-newspapers/6305-20201129-eleftheros-typos.

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as identities, such as the ‘refugee’, the ‘migrant’, the ‘asylum seeker’, the ‘volunteer’, the ‘tourist’, the ‘activist’, the ‘researcher’ along racial, gendered and sexualized ways. This book interrogates the “violence of categorization” (Sciurba 2017) that takes place through the hotspot mechanism in Greece and the ways in which this violence is being reproduced in our daily lives, at a more personal level, and through our most intimate relationships. As people are being categorized according to the logic of the hotspot, it is, also, relations, I argue, that are being reshaped at the border according to criteria of deservingness and un-deservingness, worthiness and unworthiness. The hotspot does only involve a process that governs space. It is a process in which space is governed through time, time through space, relationships through space and time and our self through relationships whose reference point is the border. In relation to this, I show how the construction of Greece in 2015–2016 as a country of transit (promulgated by the hotspot approach) according to which ideology, refugees and prototypically Syrians are eager to pass through on their way to ‘Europe’ (see Kallius 2019 in Spathopoulou and Carastathis 2020, p. 13) is challenged both by peoples’ (embodied) experiences of (im)mobility, moving forward versus staying put or returning. Transit, I argue, constitutes “a space for processes of change or movement which are shifting, uncertain, and nonlinear” (Heney 2020, p. 17. See also Picozza 2017; Osseiran 2017; Fontanari 2015) where the dichotomy between moving forward and moving back (returning) is challenged. As I will show in the chapters of this book, contrary to the EU Commission’s representation of people on the move, as ‘mixed migratory flows’, people don’t just flow, rather they get stuck at and by borders (Spathopoulou, et al., forthcoming). Likewise, relationships don’t flow, they are regulated through multiple borders and are blocked by structures of racism, hetero—patriarchy and class. Emotions don’t just flow, they are encaged within relationships that seek to control them by transforming them into feelings of hatred and aggression or extinguishing them completely. Hence, one must struggle to love within a racist, patriarchal and anti-erotic society (Lorde 1984). This struggle to love and connect with one another forms also part of our everyday border struggles. (see also New Keywords Collective, 2016). The chapters follow the trajectories of the implementation of the hotspot from 2015 until 2020 and interrogate the spatial injustices and violences in and through bordered spaces, focussing on the “hotspots” in

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Greece as infrastructures/spatializations of European migration management that become inscribed in gendered-racialized ways on people’s bodies but also how they are rejected by people on the move through enactments of refusals.9 The hotspots, I argue, encapsulate and intensify the predicament of our ‘colonial present’ as well as the temporal and spatial dimensions of bordering and race in Greece. The main questions that each chapter grapples with are the following: Is it possible to relate to one another at the border without ‘performing and embodying the violence of the hotspot’ (Spathopoulou et al. 2020) against each other and one’s own self? How do we learn not to harm each other and our self when we are harmed by so many borders (Lorde 1984)? And, finally, is it possible to be yourself at the border? This book consists of a set of stories that we tell ourselves and to each other around our geographic imaginaries and sense of self, that is, where we are coming from, who we were and who have become we (because of the border) and where we want to go and who we want to be beyond the border(s). In an attempt to respond to these questions, I draw upon Audre Lorde’s inspiring discussions on what she terms the “power of the erotic”. Specifically, she argues that Recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world, rather than merely settling for a shift of characters in the same weary drama. For not only do we touch our most profoundly creative source, but we do that which is female and selfaffirming in the face of a racist, patriarchal ~ and anti-erotic society. (Lorde 1984, p. 59)

In relation to Lorde’s powerful statement, it is exactly the power of the erotic, that the Hotspot Approach ends up containing by controlling and regulating it through its violence of categorization. The power, in other words, to be yourself according to “what feels right to me” in the face of racist and patriarchal violence (Lorde 1984) and the power to turn against the logic of the hotspot by turning towards each other. The hotspot as an infrastructure does not just regulate peoples’ mobility

9 I would like to thank here Anna Carastathis for this summary of my work/book, as I always struggle to put into clear and adequate words what exactly I am researching, and as usual Anna provides me with the most precise and meaningful words.

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across borders, between the islands and the mainland and within the territory between the city and the camp; it does not just impede the freedom of mobility across space. It, also, I argue, stops people from freely and genuinely turning to their self and one another to. The following pages narrate, moreover, how experiences of (im)mobility shape and distort our sense of self and hence how we relate to one another. I am inspired by Fanon’s work who describes the phenomenology of the black body with regard to the experience of restriction, uncertainty and obstruction (Fanon 1967 in Heney 2020, p. 14). Drawing upon Fanon’s analysis of the way in which black people were taught to think of themselves, it is important, I argue, to explore how the hotspot as a neocolonial system that intensifies and multiplies the border shapes the way people on the move perceive themselves and others around them according to hierarchies of deservingness/worthiness that become inscribed on peoples’ skin and bodies. I show how people as a result of border violence turn to their bodies as the location from where they are experiencing the pain in order to remove it, within practices that tend to be classified as ‘self-harm’ in mental health governance and ‘voluntary returns’ within migration management. In relation to the context of the hotspot, it is important, I argue, to trace “the political, racial, and historical roots of suffering” (Beneduce 2016) and of ‘self-harm’. In this way, this book enquires into the understudied (in my opinion) linkages between border violence and practices of self-harm, both of which constitute embodied experiences. Transnationally, migrants inside detention have turned to acts of embodied protest, such as hunger strikes and self-injury as a way to protest against their situation of protracted confinement (Oberti 2021; Hill 2019; Aitchison 2019). Amy Chandler and Zoi Simopoulou (2021) in “The Violence of the Cut: Gendering Self-Harm” engage in an exploration of self-harm as a gendered practice. Taking as a starting point the frequent characterization of self-harm as “an adolescent thing for girls”, they seek to make sense of the gendering of self-harm, focusing on a series of dualistic Cartesian “cuts” between male and female, violence and vulnerability and inside and outside (2021: abstract). My analysis of borders and practices of self-harm within the context of the hotspot has been particularly inspired, moreover, by Veronica Heney’s (2020) approach to self-harm “as a frame within which to fruitfully consider theories of agency” and her discussion on what “a more thorough consideration of experiences and understandings of self-harm might contribute

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to feminist thinking by incorporating considerations of embodiment into discussions of agency and refusing masculinist paradigms of individualised or purely cognitive subjectivity” (p. 7). Using a phenomenological perspective, particularly that of Sara Ahmed, to conceive of self-harm as an embodied, relational and repeated act, Heney highlights “the need to explore theorizations of agency as multiple and uncertain, as exercised in contexts of necessity, and as continuous rather than discrete” (p. 7). “This return to the body, and the multiple and messy experiences of embodiment, might allow”, she argues, “for a more productive platform for future feminist thinking” (ibid.). Similarly, I argue, a focus on selfharm allows for a feminist enquiry into what I see as the intersections between the border and gendered violence. Specifically, inspired by my work in the Feminist Autonomous Centre for Research and my in depthdiscussions on borders and gender violence with one of its co-founders‚ Anna Carastathis‚ I discuss how border violence draws upon scripts of gendered violence and how their interrelation shapes the experiences and emotions of those who are located at the border. As Vicky Canning (2020; 2017) has insightfully discussed in relation to Britain’s asylum system, harm is inflicted by the structures of coercive control set out by the state and its amorphous relations with corporations. Moreover, she illustrates how “the everyday threat of detention and deportation; poor housing and inadequate welfare access; and systemic cuts to domestic and sexual violence support all contribute to a temporal limbo which limits women’s personal autonomy and access to basic human rights” (2017: abstract). Similarly, the hotspot system draws upon scripts of gendered violence in its so-called ‘migration management’. Indeed, there are many parallels between the (embodied) experiences of gendered violence and border violence. In both cases emotional and physical violence is enacted in order to gain and maintain control over a person’s body, behaviour, acts and movements. In both cases it is about living with and against control: What time will you be back, what time are you leaving, with whom and for what reason and how often are you supposed to exit and enter the house/hotspot are rules that regulate both people who are suffering from domestic abuse and border violence. As is the case with the new controlled and closed hotspots on the islands (a situation that was already in force on the pretext of the pandemic crisis), it is exactly about controlling one’s mobility and activities through specific requirements and timelines. As with the closed and controlled hotspots and in situations of gendered violence, those in power create conditions

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where one supposedly shouldn’t even have to go out, on the pretext that everything that they need is in the house or camp, such as food, medical assistance, educational activities, entertainment and cash. In both cases, very often protection is being used as a pretext to restrict the person’s freedom by imprisoning her within a house, a relationship, a city, an island, a camp or a hotspot. Thus, in domestic and border violence, manipulation is always at play and is used as a tool by those in power so that the controlled person ‘voluntary’ succumbs to their power and dominance. Behaviours and relations are shaped in such a way that self-confidence is broken, leading one to turn against her will and body. And this turning against oneself may take many forms: self-harm, selfregulation, self-detention, self-deportation and self-censoring, all of which are enactments found both in situations of gendered and border violence. I have witnessed and experienced how self-harm becomes a daily practice in situations of border/gendered violence, as one’s sense of self has been distorted. In both border violence and gendered violence, geography is being used as way of isolating people, cutting them of from their networks, separating them from their loved ones. We only need to think here how on the border islands and on the mainland, all hotspot/camps are located in remote geographical locations, far away from the cities and towns and with limited transportation. In addition to this, governmental authorities insist that the residents of the camp should only trust them and the organizations that are under their control. Few days after the burning of the Moria hotspot in Lesvos, the Greek Ministry of Migration and Asylum launched ‘Migration Greece Info’, a Viber community through which asylum seekers receive updates on different matters—such as relocation, asylum applications and temporary closure of the asylum office. “The community chat has also been used for warning asylum seekers from being in touch with NGOs and blackmailing those who refused to enter the new camp in Lesvos: ‘the Greek state guarantees your security. Do not believe anyone else. Your life is safe only in the new camp […] From today on, water and food supplies will only be available inside the camp’”10 (see also Spathopoulou and Tazzioli 2021). Alongside practices of blackmail, when the surrounding environment starts to suspect that something is not quite right, such as the case with the illegal practices of push backs at

10 Viber chat sent to the asylum seekers in Lesvos on 29 September 2020.

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the Greek—Turkish borders‚ like the perpetrators of gendered violence‚ the state response is “fake news”.11 As Monckton Smith (2021) has argued in relation to gendered violence, once the subject under abuse starts to show signs of resistance and ‘disobedience’, this resistance acts as a trigger for the abuser to seek other more radical and effective measures with which to limit the person’s freedom. Turning to the border islands, we read the plans of the government to install in all camps cameras and various surveillance tech and motion detection algorithms (Molnar 2021) with the aim to, also, impede any form of protest or resistance inside the hotspots and camps. Lastly, physical abuse is being enacted in situations of both border and gendered violence. In combination with the emotional abuse, in many cases domestic and border violence ends in death, either in the form of homicide and/or murder (see also Smith 2021). There are many examples, many of which haven’t even reached the news, of people committing suicide inside detention as well as people being murdered both inside detention and at the borders, whether it is from gunshots (see Human Rights Watch 2018) or by drowning as the result of being pushed back at sea12 . As my colleague and friend Anna Carastathis has pointed out in one of our many conversations‚ these deaths are often the culmination of the subjects’ physical and psychological humiliation along gendered lines (e.g., stripped naked or being called with sexist terms).13 Starting from the feminist principles that the “personal is political” and particularly the work of Black Feminist scholars who outline the liberating process of theorizing from experience, I turn to my personal and intimate relationships that I developed within and against the boundaries of the ‘field’, with people who arrived in Greece from the ‘wrong side’ of the Aegean border. These relations that span across the five years of 2015–2020 (and beyond) were shaped by the socio-political landscape of the multiple crises and the various policies that were implemented to ‘solve’ them, particularly the EU–Turkey Deal of 18 March 2016 that ‘cut’ through peoples’ experiences by separating their bodies and lives according to their nationality and date of arrival on the border islands. 11 see: https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/30272/greek-migration-minister-callsallegations-of-migrant-pushbacks-fake-news. 12 see: ecks/.

https://rsaegean.org/en/deaths-at-the-borders-refugee-and-migrant-shipwr

13 See: AYS (2018) on three women found dead at river Evros.

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I enquire into, moreover, how my own intimate relationships with people during the years of 2015–2020 were contained within the ‘refugee crisis’ script’—a script that, also, formulated the script of my research. I am particularly interested in how this script was constructed around the clear distinction between having chosen or having had no choice, and how this binary partakes in the making and unmaking of the ‘refugee-economic migrant’ dichotomy (see also Apostolova 2016). I am interested, in other words, how the hotspot by fixing and holding bodies and subjects to certain paths or what we will see as ‘routes’ it also allocates them specific roles that they must perform in order to survive at the hotspot (and beyond) (see also Gloria E. Anzaldúa‚ 1987). Thinking of scripts and their performances along the lines of Judith Butler’s (2002) analysis of gender as performance in Gender Trouble and the distinction that she makes at the beginning of her essay ‘Critically Queer’, in Bodies that Matter, between performance and performativity, where the former presumes a subject whereas the latter contests the very notion of the subject, I explore how by performing the assigned roles (along racial, gendered and sexualized ways) of the crisis’s script, we end up “performing the hotspot and embodying its violence” (Spathopoulou et al. 2020). As Butler has pointed out, “for if the one who practices nonviolence is related to the one against whom violence is contemplated, then there appears to be a prior social relation between them; they are part of one another, or one self is implicated in another self […] an ethics of nonviolence cannot be predicated on individualism” (Butler 2020, p. 9 in Hughes 2021, p. 5). In relation to the idea of performance, in the following chapters, I observe how agency and choice in contexts of violence, such as those that thrive at the border, harm and become harmful. By referring to a ‘harmful agency’, I am speaking of a process that has become constitutive of processes of bordering; that of a selfturning against itself. Sarah M. Hughes (2021) argues, and I agree, that all intention is relational and that intentionality is “an emergent relation with the world, rather than an a priori condition of experience” (p. 12). In this book, I seek to understand how might we think of harmful and harming agency, as that stemming from the intention not to harm? Finally, this book attempts to bring into dialogue the autonomous migration literature and the ways in which it discusses the migrant subject as agentic (De Genova 2017; Mezzadra 2011; Papadopoulos et al. 2008; Papadopoulos and Tsianos 2013; Andrijasevic 2010 see in

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Hughes p. 547) and that influenced my early Ph.D. work with the feminist perspectives that stem from a politics of location and refusal that draw upon the theoretical framework of intersectionality (Crenshaw 1991; Carastathis 2016). In relation to this, I seek to understand contexts in which border violence cuts through and shapes our agentic capacities, the choices we make and ultimately the relationships that we establish.

My Own Journey from ‘Mobile Ethnography’ to a ‘Politics of Location’ In what follows is an account of my conceptual journey from my ‘mobile ethnography’ (Knowles 2014) to a ‘politics of location’ (Boyce Davies 1994, p. 153; 2013; Kaplan 1994; Radhakrishnan 2000; Nayak 2017) in the years between 2015 and 2020. Mobile ethnography was a methodological choice that I made based on the trajectories of both the people who were channelled through the hotspot and transported to the mainland by ferry and of my own trajectories between the islands and the mainland (by ferry), as I followed the people on the move that I became emotionally attached to. The way in which their subjectivities and experience of self were being (re)shaped in the slippages between the various declared ‘crises’ but also through our own interactions, affected the way I came to understand the hotspot, the methodology I developed to systematically analyse its declared and undeclared functions (see Spathopoulou and Carastathis 2020) and the ethical and political questions regarding research practice that I engage in. In my previous work during my Ph.D. studies, I introduced the ‘mobile hotspot’ “as an analytical tool with which to examine how aspects of the hotspot—as a border infrastructure—do not stay put within the confines of sites where it officially operates (e.g., Moria on Lesvos, or Vathi on Samos) but follows people who are processed through it to the mainland” (Spathopoulou 2016; Spathopoulou and Carastathis 2020; Spathopoulou et al. 2020, 2021). “As hotspots were instituted on islands at the maritime border region of Greece, the relationship of the islands to the mainland and the geographical restriction of mobility to people arriving there had become a tool of control” (Spathopoulou and Carastathis 2020, p. 2). I showed, moreover, how the hotspot engages in the multiplication of informal hotspots on the Greek territory and affects the mobility and lives of people with a ‘migrant background’ who have been living for years in Greece or even born in the country.

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The conceptualization of the ‘mobile hotspot’ is based on my readings of William Walters’s notion of ‘viapolitics’ with which he argues that vehicles, roads and routes merit a much more central place in theorizations of migration politics (2015). By introducing ‘viapolitics’ Walters argues that it is important to analyze vehicles as mobile sites of power and contestation in their own right. Moreover, he points out that an understanding of the materiality of transportation helps to explain how the vehicle can sometimes become a site of strategic political action. In his text “On the Road with Michel Foucault: Deportation, Aviation, and Viapolitics”, Walters critically enquires into what he calls the “Foucault fix”: “the fact that Foucault’s genealogies of power and subjectivity tend to privilege fixed structures, such as the prison, the clinic and the school … Yet these lines of connection, these routes and passages are never systematically developed in Foucault” (Walters 2015b, p. 3). Similarly, I caution against the ‘hotspot fix’, that is, approaching the hotspot exclusively as a fixed structure, a self-contained site, by examining a “carceral archipelago in intimate detail” (Walters 2015b, p. 3) while paying less attention to the ways in which the hotspot system operates upon lines of connection, routes and passages (Spathopoulou and Carastathis 2020, p. 8). I use the ferry as an illustrative tool with which to concretise the concept of the mobile hotspot, since the ferry reveals in very tangible ways the making and unmaking of the economic migrant/refugee binary; it further connects to the ways in which the making and unmaking of this binary are tied to particular experiences of immobility/mobility, and the interplay between ‘scenes’ of arrival and ‘obscenes’ of departure in and from Greece. Thus, the ferry is used both as a metaphor and as a concrete vehicle of research (Spathopoulou and Carastathis 2020, p. 2). A focus on the ferry, or rather how people on the move are being denied the ‘right to the ferry’ provides us with insights into the ways in which the multiple spatial reshaping—produced through infrastructural, political and legal measures—have contributed to the enforcement of migrants’ “cramped spaces” (Walters and Luthi 2016; Thoburn 2016), that is, of spaces where migrants have restricted leeway both for moving and for staying. According to Walters and Luthi, “cramped is not a neutral or impassive word. The idea of cramped space addresses the actuation of mobility: how mobility really happens with its focus on the multi-sensorial and felt characteristics which become apparent in the cramped transport” (2016, p. 5). Moreover, they argue that “at the risk of vulgarizing this promising

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notion, we do suggest that places, experiences and infrastructures of contentious and contested mobility provide scholars with ‘extreme cases’ (Flyvbjerg 2001) of cramped space, that is, contexts where features are pronounced and thus particularly accessible to critical thought” (p. 6). The hotspot infrastructure, I argue, constitutes such an ‘extreme case’ as do the experiences that stem from it, such as those of self-harm, “as a practice of survival, a way of continuing to move through spaces and in relation to other bodies despite discomfort or restrictions” (Heney 2020, p. 16). The concept of ‘cramped spaces’ has helped me to analyze moreover, “how experiences of self-harm simultaneously invoke feelings of being in control and of being out of control” (p. 10). Nicholas Thoburn (2016) argues that “against social and political theories that seek the source of political practice in a collective identity, the theory of cramped space contends that politics arises among those who lack and refuse coherent identity, in their encounter with the impasses, limits, or impossibilities of individual and collective subjectivity. Cramped space, as Deleuze puts it, is a condition where ‘the people are missing’” (p. 367). Thus, I began to explore the following questions: how do we relate to each other within conditions of cramp-ness? What kind of relationships develop when the people are missing and only categories, such as that of the ‘refugee’, the ‘migrant’ and the ‘researcher’ remain fixed? And what happens when we refuse to relate to each other through these categories? The theory of cramped space has provided me with very useful insights into how the hotspot system enforces situations where people have restricted leeway both for moving and for staying. At a personal level, the situation of not being able neither to remain put in a place, in other words, to feel rooted, but neither to completely move forward without an urge to return, is familiar (to me). Specifically, when I returned to Greece after having spent five years in Turkey, I struggled both to feel at home in the place where I had been born and raised and to move on and settle down in the UK where I began my PhD studies. I felt stuck, physically and emotionally, as I observed whole territories of my homeland turn into prisons for people that I also cared for and loved. This experience of ‘stuck-ness’, also, intensified during my Ph.D. studies, as there were many times that I thought I could not move forward, that I would never complete it and that, indeed, I was stuck both within the research and writing process. I became, interested, therefore, in the emotional landscape of cramped spaces and I began to search for theoretical tools and

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a methodology that would enable me to connect my personal feelings, emotions and relationships that I developed through the research-writing process to the hotspot regime that I sought to study. My work with the Feminist Autonomous Centre for Research in Athens, the discussions and collaborations with my collaborators and the scholars/activists that we are engaged with, particularly the Black Feminist Literature and Indigenous Scholarship that challenges the (false) separations between theory and praxis, content and method, research and activism, encouraged me to embrace my own feelings, contradictions and ethical–political dilemmas as theoretical tools with which to understand how borders are performed in our daily lives. It was at FAC and my engagement with thinkers such as Bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa and Audra Simpson that towards the end of my Ph.D., I started to reflect on my own positionality at the border and the kind of situations that I was ‘stuck in’ within my research by asking the following question: What happens when our research ‘inhabits the borderlands’? (Gloria E. Anzaldúa, 1987). Thus, through my mobile ethnography I arrived at the “politics of location” (Boyce Davies 1994, p. 153, 2013; Kaplan 1994; Radhakrishnan 2000, pp. 56–57 in Nayak 2017). Specifically, I build on Suryia Nayak’s “location as method” that functions simultaneously as content (the what) and method (the how). Specifically, she argues that: the tensions of who or what is host and guest in politics of location are complicated by the fact that we all occupy simultaneous “multiple contested” locations (Radhakrishnan, 2000, pp. 56–57).We are multiply located and these locations do not act in splendid isolation. We could think of this in terms of a cartography of intersectionality of locations where “the intersectional experience is greater than” the sum of the location of our race plus the location of our gender plus the location of our class (Crenshaw, 1989, p. 140). In the context of research methodology, the intersectional cartography of researcher, researched, content and method is “greater than” researcher, plus researched, plus method, and plus content. (2017, p. 208).

Moreover, she contends that “the quandary is that there is no non-racist location. If “racist social structures create racist psychic structures” (Oliver 2001, p. 34) then we are all racist subjects (Nayak 2015, p. 51). The problem is that we are all “implicated” (Caselli 2005, p. 105 in Nayak 2017, p. 210) or what I argue throughout the following chapters of this book, we are all engaged/encaged within the reality that we seek

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to explore and change. While with the concept of ‘cramped space’ I enquired into the kinds of resistances that emerged at and against the hotspot system, what elsewhere we have discussed as ‘hotspots of resistance’, “location as method” has helped me to enquire into the ways in which people refuse the various subjectivities that get inscribed as identities on peoples’ bodies in racialized and gendered ways. In other words, how people (including the researcher herself) refuse to perform the specific roles that have been allocated to them according to these categories by attempting to relate to themselves and consequently to each other differently/beyond the hotspot reality. In relation to these enactments of refusal, I became interested in the translation work that is involved and the emotional labour that is at stake in attempts to translate differently (Rodriguez 2006; Spathopoulou and Meier 2020). It was at this point, in November 2019, a few months after finalizing my Ph.D. that I met with my current collaborator Isabel Meier at Tampere University in Finland where I was based for a short period of time as a visiting researcher and with whom we began to explore the following questions: What happens if we refuse to perform the border within our research? Would this mean having to refuse to do research at/on the border and with people that seek to cross it? Shifting attention to the politics of refusal, we have argued with Isabel Meier, is a starting point, from where to “refuse to participate in the violence that the binaries between method and content, being “actively” and “passively” engaged, as well as categories of migrant figures (re)produce with the conscious intention of breaking down the multiple borders that have been erected to keep us apart ‘within’ and ‘outside’ of research” (Spathopoulou and Meier 2020). Moreover, within our project on the politics of refusal (Special Issue “Politics of Refusal” forthcoming) we point out the importance of tracing and connecting refusal to its roots in Black Feminist activism and scholarship, in other words, to the “disobedient modality of rupturative thinking, living, and doing rooted in the knowledge begat by the racial and gendered nexus of Black women” (Green and Bey 2017, p. 5). In the years that followed the completion of my Ph.D. studies and as we entered into the global Covid-19 pandemic crisis, with relationships ending and new ones emerging, at FAC together with the Legal Centre Lesvos we observed how the pandemic crisis has become a pretext for rebordering projects and installing harsher divisions amongst the global population and amongst ourselves. Through we show how through

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the naturalization of race, pandemic management operates as migration management, which has led to construction of new borders and the intensification of already existing ones. A global regime of vaccine apartheid has reinforced, moreover, the violent border regime and the forms of inequality, exploitation and marginalization it reproduces. Within this context of perpetuated lockdown and separation from our loved ones and when the act of turning to our bodies and towards each other has become the focus of heated debates and in some cases has even been criminalized, Audre Lorde’s question in a journal entry written from 1984 becomes even more significant: How do we learn to love each other while we are embattled on so many fronts? Drawing upon her ground-breaking question, in this book I ask: How do we learn to love each other at the border… to love each other on a bench?

The response(s) to these questions do not only explain why I did not sit with Ege on that bench in Exarchia, in Athens. They might also answer whether things could have turned out differently if I had.

Fiction as a Method14 This monograph is based on ongoing research in Greece (particularly Lesvos, Samos and Athens) from 2015 until the time of this writing. The largest part of the research was conducted during my Ph.D. studies between 2015 and 2019. In 2020, alongside the fieldwork that I was engaged in as a Research Associate in the GLiTCH research project at Goldsmiths University, I continued to explore and reflect on issues that mattered most to me, such as processes of bordering and politics of refusal. The ways in which processes of bordering relate to the development of harmful and controlling behaviours is something that I have recently become interested in and therefore, I understand that it is not fully developed in this book. I hope to develop the various arguments that I am making around harmful agency in future work.

14 Once again, I must thank Anna Carastathis for inspiring me to engage in fiction as a method within research and writing. I turned to this idea around fiction at a later stage in the writing of this book and I am aware that it deserves a more in-depth engagement, analysis and clarity that I hope to develop within future work, hopefully, together with you Anna!

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The arguments that I develop in the following chapters are based on in-depth conversations with people who are being racialized as asylum seekers, refugees and migrants, people who identified themselves as volunteers and/or activists, interviews with state actors, humanitarian actors, participant observations in bordered contexts and discourse analysis of the border regime to interrogate how governing discourses fix or hold bodies and subjects to certain paths (see Heney 2020) or what I refer to as routes. At a later stage of my research, I also, looked extensively into policy and legal documents, especially those relating to the Greek asylum law and its various changes and the legal context surrounding detention and deportation policies. This monograph stems from my own experiences of border and gendered violence and how they affected my research process and the tensions that resulted particularly via the research relation with specific people. In this sense, what I wish to develop in the following pages, is an auto-ethnography (Khosravi 2010) of my experience with and against borders since 2015. It is important to mention here that autoethnography was not a method within my research during the years between 2015 and 2020. It rather formed a method during the process of writing this monograph, a process in which the boundaries between research and writing become blurred. Through auto-ethnography, my aim is not to ‘overshadow’ or ‘write off’ other peoples’ experiences, the socalled subjects of my research. Rather, by turning to my own experiences and emotions during these years and responding to how I am feeling now as I write these pages, is an attempt to (re) connect with their experiences in order to move beyond a ‘single story’ (Adichie 2017) of the ‘crisis’. At the same time, auto-ethnography serves me as a way of addressing the predominance of experiences belonging to those who identify as men in my research and consequently in the pages of this book. While at a later stage of my research I turned to my fellow sisters in order to seek solidarity in their strength, I simultaneously turned to myself as a woman and in many ways as migrant at the border. Hence, in this book, I draw upon notes, thoughts, poems, lyrics from songs/music (such as those composed/played by Anoushka Shankar‚ Ravi Shankar‚ Kate Bush, Joan Baez, Sharon Kovacs and others) that inspired me during my times of research and writing and thoughts/ideas that I kept in my diary throughout 2015–2020 as well as more recent reflections that I wrote down spontaneously during the writing process of the book. In the writing up of this monograph, inspired by Behrouz Boochani’s

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novel No Friend But the Mountains (2018) that melds fact and fiction and merging prose and poetry, I draw upon fiction as a method with which to maintain both the anonymity of the people involved in my research and to capture the atmosphere and emotional landscape that prevailed during those years, as well as peoples’ inner conflicts and contradictions as a result of a ‘migration management’. By fiction I mean that I include short passages that take the form of reflections, dialogues (some of which at a later stage have been titled), silences (within the dialogues) and poems that are based on real conversations that took place during the research, notes from my research-diary and reflections that spontaneously occurred during the (current) writing process. These short passages include commentaries on the research and writing process creating in this way a kind of ‘meta-discussion’. The characters that appear in the monograph are constructed around real people (including the researcher) and their experiences around real events, places and dates. Each character is built upon a multiplicity of experiences, such as border crossing, transit, detention, deportation, self-harm, researching, volunteering, falling in love and separation, all of which are crosscut by the intersections of border/gendered violence. While I largely draw upon an intimate relationship that I established with one particular person on the move, by no means do I imply that gendered violence is unique to a specific culture, gender and legal status of the ‘refugee’ or a ‘migrant’. On the contrary, it should be noted that my discussion draws upon my and other peoples’ experiences of violence within various relationships including those with so-called European citizens raised in a ‘Western culture’. Although this book draws upon elements from my own personal relationship during those years, it is not about one specific relationship and two specific people; it is about what happens to relationships in general that develop under the gaze of the hotspot. While the book is predominantly factual, it uses fictional elements to convey the impossibility of putting forward a faithful and coherent narrative of what was said and what was going on during these years‚ the ‘incompleteness of every translation’ (Spathopoulou and Meier 2020) that is‚ the impossibility of fully exchanging our experiences of and at borders (Gutiérrez Rodríguez‚ 2006). The inclusion of the silences within each dialogue and the unfinished conversations‚ moreover, are inspired by Sarah Wright’s discussion of what it means to refuse dialogue. As Wright (2018) points out, “dialogue as it is often deployed is supported by a host of colonial logics that position many marginalized humans, and

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nonhumans, as unable to communicate ‘rationally’ (that is to dialogue)” and suggests that “refusal can mean more than merely stepping outside dialogue, allowing the problematic to pass unchallenged” (abstract). We don’t always have the time and space to engage in coherent dialogues at the border. I try to use the feminine pronounce as inclusive of all other genders. Fictitious names are being used for all people involved. The research that this book is based on has received ethical approval both from the King’s College University of London where I completed my Ph.D. and from Durham University where the Principal Investigator of the GliTCH project is based in. As a woman, I have many times been accused of having lost control, not least as a researcher, for trespassing the boundaries between the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of the research, the ‘personal’ and the ‘political’, ‘research’ and ‘activism’. Who is in control during the fieldwork and over the research process, is part of the discussions around methods and defining who will have control over the data, is part of the data management plan that one has to provide with every ethical approval application (Heney and Poleykett 2021). In relation to the above, along the lines of Audre Lorde, I conclude that academia and how it is being reproduced within neoliberal hegemonic institutions is above all an anti-erotic space of knowledge production. It is part of a system, that does not value the power of the erotic and the kind of knowledge that stems from it, as well as our ability to be our self through it. As Lorde argues, our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe (1984, p. 57).

Inspired by the above words, in this auto-ethnographic account, I reflect on the process of researching, the political and ethical issues that are at stake within research that is located both at and against the border. Writing this book has also provided me with the opportunity to reflect on how I would/should do things differently in future research. As I try to show, this process is full of tensions and contradictions; hence, as many researchers in the same position as me, I felt and feel very much conflicted

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as I seek to form a critique of a situation that I am consciously taking part in and continuously returning to. This relates to the question that I posed earlier: how might we think of harmful and harming agency, as that stemming from the intention not to harm? This brings me back to borders and the immense harm that they cause, albeit unevenly to different subjects. As someone who herself has turned to acts of self-harm as one which simultaneously invoked feelings of being in control and of being out of control (Heney, 2020) and whose subject of research, the ‘refugee crisis’ in Lesvos, has been defined in many occasions by people close to me as itself unsettling, violent and, thus, ‘self-harming’, in this book I seek to understand the connections between research, return and eventual recovery. Self-harm according to Zoi Simopoulou and Amy Chandler (2020) is “repetitive, permanent, deep, superficial, pleasing, ongoing, returning; it is an attempt at keeping oneself going even if it is by harming oneself” (p. 110). On the other hand, as the physician Gabor Maté (2008) has insightfully highlighted to us, recovery (from an illness or trauma) implies that in order for one to recover (something) they must return; according to Maté, to one’s childhood in order to recover the authentic self that has been lost through experiences of dealing with trauma. Thus, I ask if research is ongoing, returning, repetitive and permanent (as I show in the following chapters), is it, also, about returning to the self, to the people that are missing by being engaged/encaged within the various bordered categories? And if as Flynn (2015) notes, self-harm is a practice of repeated hurt, but also of repeated healing as one is not possible without the other (in Heney 2020, p. 15), if research at the border is a process of repeated hurt, then is writing one of repeating healing since one is not possible without the other?

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European Commission. (2015a). A European Agenda on Migration. Brussels, 13 May. https://ec.europa.eu/anti-trafficking/sites/antitrafficking/ files/communication_on_the_european_agenda_on_migration_en.pdf. European Commission. (2015b). Explanatory Note on the Hotspot Approach. http://www.statewatch.org/news/2015/jul/eu-com-hotsposts.pdf. Fanon, F. (1967). Black Skin, White Masks. New York, NY: Grove Press. Flynn, G. (2015). I Was Not a Nice Little Girl [online]. Powell’s Books https:// medium.com/@Powells/i-was-not-a-nice-little-girl-c2df01e0ae1. Access Date April 2018. Flyvbjerg, B. (2001). Making Social Science Matter: Why Social Inquiry Fails and How it can Succeed Again. Cambridge University Press. Fontanari, E. (2015). ‘Confined to the Threshold. The Experiences of Asylum Seekers in Germany’, City, 19(5): 709–721. Green, K. M., & Bey, M. (2017). Where Black Feminist Thought and Trans* Feminism Meet: A conversation. Souls, 19 (4), 438–454. Heney, V. (2020). Unending and Uncertain: Thinking Through a Phenomenological Consideration of Self-Harm Towards a Feminist Understanding of Embodied Agency. Journal of International Women’s Studies, 21(3): 7–21. Heney, V. and Poleykett, B. (2021). The Impossibility of Engaged Research: Complicity and Accountability Between Researchers, ‘Publics’ and Institutions. Sociology of Health & Illness. Hill, A. (2019) “More than 3,000 Hunger Strikes at Immigration Centres in UK Since 2015.” The Guardian, 15 August, https://www.theguardian.com/ uk-news/2019/aug/15/more-than-3000-hunger-strikes-at-immigration-cen tres-in-uk-since-2015. Hughes, S.M. (2021). (In)coherent Subjects? The Politics of Conceptualising Resistance in the UK Asylum System. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space. https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544211033872. Human Rights Watch. (2018a). Greece: Violent Pushbacks at Turkey Border: End Summary Returns, Unchecked Violence, 18 December. https://www.hrw.org/ news/2018/12/18/greece-violent-pushbacks-turkey-border. Human Rights Watch. (2018b). Greece: Rescuers at Sea Face Baseless Accusations: Prosecution Seeks to Criminalise Saving Lives, 5 November. https://www.hrw. org/news/2018b/11/05/greece-rescuers-sea-face-baseless-accusations. Khosravi, S. (2010). ’Illegal’traveller: an Auto-ethnography of Borders. Springer. Knowles, Caroline (2014) Flip-Flop: A Journey Through Globalisation’s Backroads. London: Pluto Press. Legal Centre Lesvos. Despite the Discriminatory Lockdown on Camps and Hostility Towards Migrants and those in Solidarity with them, Resistance Grows. 18th August, 2020. http://legalcentrelesvos.org/2020/08/18/des pite-the-discriminatory-lockdown-on-camps-and-hostility-towards-migrantsand-those-in-solidarity-with-them-resistance-grows/.

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Picozza, F. (2017). “Dubliners”: Unthinking Displacement, Illegality and Refugeeness Within Europe’s Geographies of Asylum. In De Genova, N. (eds.), The Borders of Europe: Autonomy of Migration, Tactics of Bordering. Duke University Press. Reidy, E. In the news: Greece is using Floating Tents to Deport Asylum Seekers. The New Humanitarian. 26 May 2020. https://www.thenewhumanitarian. org/news/2020/05/26/Greece-asylum-seekers-floating-orange-tent-rafts#: ~:text=In%20the%20news%3A%20Greece%20reportedly,in%20the%20last% 20two%20months.. Rodriguez, E.G. (2006). Translating Positionality: On Post-Colonial Conjunctures and Transversal Understanding. http://eipcp.net/transversal/0606/ gutierrez-rodriguez/en (accessed 6 February 2012). Sciurba, Alessandra. (2017). Categorizing Migrants by Undermining the Right to Asylum: The Implementation of the “Hotspot Approach” in Sicily. Etnografia e ricerca Qualitative: 97–120. Simopoulou, Z., and Chandler, A. (2020). Self-Harm As an Attempt at Self-Care. European Journal for Qualitative Research in Psychotherapy, 10: 110–120. Smith, J.M. (2021). In Control: Dangerous Relationships and How They End in Murder. Bloomsbury. Spathopoulou, Aila. (2016). The Ferry as a Mobile Hotspot: Migrants at the Uneasy Borderlands of Greece. Society & Space, 8 November. Accessed at http://societyandspace.org/2016/12/15/the-ferry-as-a-mobilehotspot-migrants-at-the-uneasy-borderlands-of-greece/, on 5 July 2017. Spathopoulou, A., Pauliina Kallio, K., & Hakli, J. (2021). Outsourcing Hotspot Governance within the EU: Cultural Mediators as Humanitarian–Border Workers in Greece. International Political Sociology, 15(3), 359–377. Spathopoulou, Aila, and Carastathis, A. (2020). Hotspots of Resistance in a Bordered Reality. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 38(6): 1067–1083. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775820906167. Spathopoulou, Aila, and Meier, I. (2020). Turning the Gaze Upon Power: Refusal as Research in/to and Against the EU Border Regime. Spathopoulou, A., Carastathis, A., and Tsilimpounidi, M. (2020). ‘Vulnerable Refugees’ and ‘Voluntary Deportations’: Performing the Hotspot, Embodying Its Violence. Geopolitics: 210–232. Spathopoulou, A., & Tazzioli, M. (2021). Turning Refugees into Migrants: Transit, Dependency and Technological Disruptions in the Greek Asylum System. Parallax, 27(3), 282–299. Tazzioli, Martina. (2016a). Greece’s Camps Europe’s Borders. Published in Oxford Bordercriminologies blog. https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/research-sub ject-groups/centrecriminology/centrebordercriminologies/blog/2016/10/ greece’s-camps.

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CHAPTER 2

Mapping Out the Hotspot

Waiting for the ‘Flow’ It was one morning at the beginning of May, I was doing nothing as usual, hoping that someone would call me for a shift in the fields. On my way to the grocery, I fell upon a policeman, he called me over. I thought what I have done wrong again, but laughingly he said to me: Turkey has opened the tap, the flow will start to arrive so get prepared. You need to come with us to welcome them and help us separate the bad guys from the good ones. (Karlos’s encounter with the policeman in Vathi, Samos, July 2015. He recounted the policeman’s invitation during one of our first meetings on Samos in July 2015).

In the above excerpt, we see how Karlos in the summer of 2015 was introduced to what was referred to by EU states and the media as “Europe’s worst refugee crisis” since World War II (Carastathis 2018a, p. 142). And in turn, this is how I understood during my first visit to Samos by ferry from Turkey where I had been living for the last five years prior to commencing my PhD studies in London, that a ‘crisis’ was on its way. I was presented with the image of a tap that Turkey had opened and allowed for the water to flow across the Aegean Sea to the ‘Greek’ border islands. I was told by the Greek authorities that this was a tap that Turkey © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Spathopoulou, Bordering and Governmentality Around the Greek Islands, Mobility & Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08589-5_2

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could close at any time and threat to reopen again, using it as a kind of bargain chip against Europe. It is important to reflect on the particular location at which the arrival of the ‘crisis’ was announced to Karlos, that is, the border island of Samos and by whom he was notified; the police. The fact that the police addressed Karlos and informed him of his role within the ‘crisis’, that of the potential translator in/to the ‘crisis ’, is, also, telling. Karlos was located on Samos, an island that due to its geographical position in the Aegean, and its proximity to Turkey had been constructed as a border even before the “refugee crisis” was declared. Karlos who considered this border island his “home” as he had left Algeria when he was a teenager and had been living for many years on Samos, was being positioned by the police in relation to the arriving “flow” along the following lines: “Prepare … you will need to help us separate the bad guys from the good ones”. Ironically, the same day that I met Karlos on Samos in July 2015 and told me about his encounter with the police he assured me that he could, also, help me to distinguish those refugees who really need my help from those who can harm me. He assumed without me having said anything yet regarding why I had come to Samos, that I was there to help; to help the refugees. – I know, he told me, as I have been in their situation. It is not always easy to understand who is in real need of help and who not because when you are desperate and in tremendous need you can do things that you shouldn’t be doing, things that can harm yourself and others, even if this is not your intention. It is complicated. – But I am not here to judge who deserves help and who not, I remarked. – You cannot help everyone. He responded. – You cannot help anyone if you don’t take care of yourself first, my friend Rose had warned me multiple times in relation to the ‘refugee crisis’. – Silence. (A dialogue that I created based on my conversations with Karlos on Samos in July 2015 and my friend Rose in Athens throughout 2015–2016 that I titled: “I am not here to help”).

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Karlos himself had to prove that he was no longer the “bad guy” by showing up every month at the police station. Karlos had a criminal record, he had been convicted with a 1-year prison sentence and, therefore, had lost his residence permit; he had become deportable. Once out of prison he was geographically restricted to Samos and for the following three years he had to report himself to the police. For this period, he was given a resident permit, a permit that was tied to the fact that he had to show up every month at the police, a permit that gave him a temporary permission to reside in Greece but that would terminate as soon as the procedure of reporting to the police was completed. Karlos’s deportation order was not suspended, only deferred. Karlos’s story is important as it offers insights into the logic of a system that was about to govern and follow people who cross the Aegean Sea and arrive on the five border islands. At around the same time that Karlos on Samos was approached by the policeman and informed that the ‘flow’ is on its way, in Brussels, behind closed doors, EU technocrats were deciding that a ‘crisis’ had arrived and, hence, responded with what they referred to as the ‘hotspot approach’. The declaration of a ‘refugee crisis’ in Europe—defined explicitly by authorities as a problem of categorization of those crossing the external border comprising ‘mixed migratory flows’—led to the restructuring of national migration management according to the EU’s ‘hotspot approach’ (EC 2015 in Spathopoulou et al. 2020, p. 1). An approach, that, also, viewed people like Karlos who had been living for years in Greece but were still struggling with their own legal status, along racial ways, as potential translators of and in/to the crisis. Karlos whose own future was bordered due to the eminent threat of deportation was being assigned a role in the script of the ‘refugee crisis’; that of the translator in the separation of the “mixed flows”. What would happen if he refused to perform the role of the translator? I, now, wonder, as I write these pages.

“If I refuse to help with Arabic translation, they can suspect that I am profiting from the crisis in another way, that I am smuggling refugees. Because everyone will benefit from the crisis in one way or another. And the police have already accused me of being a smuggler and in the past put me into jail because they think that all North-Africans are into drugs and smuggling”, was what Karlos had told me when I asked him in July 2015 why he has accepted to engage in this kind of harmful, and as he put it to

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me, “mentally disturbing” labour. From his words, I understood that if Karlos refused to play this ascribed role, that is, if he refused to assist in the arrival of the flow, this enactment of refusal would be interpreted as a sign of disobedience and, hence, he would be classified by the authorities as a suspected criminal. At the border on Samos, with the ‘flow’ on its way, he would interchangeably be approached as a translator or a smuggler. Due to his linguistic and cultural capital, Karlos felt compelled to accept the role of the translator and perform it well, in order to convince the authorities that he was engaging in the crisis in the correct/legal way. At the border he would decide which role he would play (diary note from 4th of October 2015). Was it at the border that I decided which direction my research should take, I now ask myself?

In the “liminal territories” that the hotspots have created, and which have resulted in “territorial enclaves which restrict rights and mobility” (Papoutsi et al. 2018, p. 11; see Bousiou and Papada 2020; Vradis et al. 2018) and which allocate specific roles to people according to their skin colour, gender and citizenship status, is it a matter of choice who to become? But we must not forget what Karlos had told me back then; that “everyone is benefiting from the crisis in one way or another”. I understood already from the summer of 2015 that I would be, also, benefiting from the crisis in one way or another. I just hadn’t yet figured out how. First the flow had to arrive, first he had to arrive.

The Prisoner of the Route Back in Turkey, as the summer of 2015 was approaching, we kept hearing from friends and acquaintances, that the borders had opened because of the Syrian child that drowned while crossing the sea {…} But I was not Syrian. I am not part of the refugee flow {…}I am a person with my own mind and who follows his own path. (Words told to me by Ege on Lesvos during various occasions in April 2016)

In the above passage from Ege’s narrative, we see how the hotspot approach extends its gaze beyond the Greek border islands, over to

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Turkey. We discern how people were being represented as a potential flow prior to their crossing of the Aegean and the violent implications that such a representation had on peoples’ sense of self and their experiences of mobility/immobility as they crossed the Aegean. I encountered many people on the move who felt the need to struggle against their containment within images that represented them either as a threat of an unstoppable flow on its way to ‘Europe’ or as passive victims of such a flow. They wanted to stand out as human beings with their own minds and will. Ege reflecting on his journey from Turkey refuses to be confined within such a representation, that is, as a flow that moves smoothly (without any obstacles) from Turkey via Greece and into Germany. By insisting to follow his own route, he challenges the refugee crisis’s hegemonically constructed narrative that represented Greece as a space of transit through which predominantly Syrian refugees made their way to ‘Europe’. Ege, as he told me, on the one hand, was being pushed by his family to move forward to Germany who was bombarding him (as he emphasized to me) with the success stories of their friends’ sons who had made it to Germany and were now moving on with their lives. On the other hand, Ege was being pushed back at the Greek Macedonian border at Idomeni by authorities that approached him as a “potential ‘economic migrant’” (Apostolova 2016) due to his ascribed Pakistani nationality. “Everyone thinks that I am stuck here in Greece, but I could have taken the Balkan-road, the borders where open for all nationalities when I arrived on Lesvos. It was my choice to remain on Lesvos and help the volunteers and not to move on to Germany”, was what Ege had told me a few after our first meeting in March 2016 on Lesvos. At the beginning of this chapter, we saw how Karlos was approached by the police officer and was informed about the role he would be asked to play based on his ‘migrant background’ in the ‘crisis’. It became clear to him even before the arrival of the ‘flow’ that he would’t be asked to assist the people on the move but the police, the state. And we saw how he felt compelled to accept this request due to his precarious legal position and criminalized status. The hotspot approach, moreover, reaches people on the other side of the Aegean in Turkey (and beyond) as we saw in the case of Ege, who already in Turkey before crossing refused to situate his crossing as part of a ‘flow’. His crossing, in other words, began with a refusal. However, similarly, to what Karlos feared, Ege’s refusal and his insistence on an autonomous route come at a price. It ascribes to

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his notions of choice and agency which along with his nationality would categorize him at the hotspot as an ‘economic migrant’, and, thus, as we shall see, as a potential criminal. In Michel Foucault’s famous work on insanity in the age of reason, Madness and Civilization, he introduces a figure that appears at once stark and mysterious. Specifically, we read that, [The ship of fools] made… [the madman] a prisoner of his own departure. But water adds to this the dark mass of its own values; it carries off, but it does more: it purifies. Navigation delivers man to the uncertainty of fate; on water, each of us is in the hands of his own destiny; every embarkation is, potentially, the last…. The madman’s voyage is at once a rigorous division and an absolute Passage…. Confined in the ship, from which there is no escape, the madman is delivered to the river with its thousand arms, the sea with its thousand roads, to the great uncertainty external to everything. He is the prisoner in the midst of what is the freest, the openest of routes: bound fast at the infinite crossroads. He is the Passenger par excellence: that is, the prisoner of the passage. (1988, p. 11)

“Thinking along the lines of Foucault’s above passage, helps us to reflect on the ways in which people on the move become contained through constructions and representations of their journeys and experiences as routes and flows to be divided and controlled. The logic of division finds itself at the heart of the hotspot approach, which performs a cut between those deemed deserving of ‘protection’—or, at least, deserving of an audience to a coerced performance justifying their right to remain—and those slated for deportation” (Spathopoulou, Carastathis and Tsilimpounidi, forthcoming). At the same time, a cut was performed between the ‘older migrants’ and the ‘new flows’ that was about to materialize in the form of a violent spatio-temporal border with the implementation of the EU– Turkey Deal in March 2016. Ege, in other words, was being encaged through a gaze, the hotspot gaze that viewed him as part of a ‘flow’ and of a particular ‘route’ that was being mapped out by Frontex’s and IOM’s representations of migrants’ journeys (see also Van Houtum and Bueno Lacy 2020; Wissink et al. 2013). Here, I would like to draw attention to what William Walters refers to as the “politics of routes as such” (2015a, p. 11) in order to reflect on how people on the move, negotiate and challenge the various routes through which the hotspot governs them. In this understanding, the route forms a process that contains people into specific categories, since,

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depending on the particular route one has taken to reach ‘Europe, various attributions of agency and choice function to determine whether she is a deserving refugee or underserving economic migrant, in other words, how she will be governed thereafter (on the mainland). At the same time, one’s ability to move forward, also, depends on one’s nationality and country of origin, that is, indeed, on the person’s roots. Thus, it is important to ask: how does one avoid becoming the prisoner of her route/roots? In relation to the “refugee crisis” script, we encounter an interrelation between roots and routes, that is, how one’s nationality or country of origin, one’s roots, (e.g. Syria), as well as gender, sexuality, and class defines the route one will take in order to arrive in Europe (e.g. by boat across the Aegean Sea) and their journey thereafter. Ege, for example, the younger adopted and ‘troubled son’ as he was being referred to by his mother, of a middle-class family in Pakistan, was expected by his family to cross the Aegean Sea, make it to Europe in order to pay back his dept to them in euros. “There were two paths available to me, marriage or migration. My family knew that I wasn’t up for the first, so they pushed me to do the second, to become a refugee, as they didn’t want me anymore around them and I made it clear to them I was not up for marriage”, he told me during one of our first conversations on Lesvos in March 2016. His sister on the other hand, together with her husband and children were granted asylum in Australia and, thus, were able to travel as political refugees by airplane from Pakistan to Australia. During my time with Ege, I witnessed his continuous refusal to be approached as part of a flow and to follow a route that was being imposed on him both by his family and the EU border regime; in other words, by “those in power” as he put it to me. Already in Turkey, Ege felt the hotspot gaze capturing him through widely circulated images and narratives that represented him as part of a ‘mixed flow’, a flow of deserving refugees and underserving economic migrants. I went with the flow, but I am not part of the flow (I write in my diary in April 2016 inspired by my conversations with Ege). What will happen if you refuse to go with the flow?

I asked Ege many times but also myself as I write these pages.

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In order to respond to the above question, we must return to where whole territories were being remapped in order to stop the ‘flow’. We must return to the Aegean border.

Hotspotization The Remapping of the Border Islands For the stage to be set up, the roles to be played out and relations to be redrawn along the lines of crises, first, whole territories had to be remapped according to the logic of the hotspot. This begs the question that together with my co-authors at FAC, we have asked elsewhere: “What came first? The crisis or the hotspot?” (Carastathis et al. 2018). It is important to understand that the ‘Greek’ border islands do not constitute a homogenous national border but are constitutive of the uneven geographies of ‘Europe’ (see De Genova 2016) and, as such are experienced by the people on the move, not only upon their arrival on a specific island but even before they arrive, as they wait to cross over from the opposite side in Turkey. Indeed, during my years in Istanbul (prior to the summer of 2015), I spoke to many people who were planning to cross over to Greece and whose main point of discussion was whether to cross over via the Turkish-Greek land border at Evros or by boat through the Aegean to a Greek border island. During this time, their focus was on which border was more violent, from which border they were most likely to be pushed back and which border was riskier, that is, where there was a higher possibility to die or rather be left to die. The island of arrival mattered, certainly, in relation to its proximity to the Turkish coast but also according to its ‘reputation’ in relation to the violence of the coastguards, the risk of being pushed back to Turkey and how they would be received by the police on the island; all of which they heard from people on the move who had already made it to the ‘other side’ or had failed to make the crossing due to the enforcement of a specific border. As the islands were being transformed into hotspots, from the summer of 2015 and onwards, through my conversations with people who had already arrived on the islands, I observed that the island’s specific migration management strategy or style, that is, each island’s specific ‘economy of detainability’ (Walters 2015a) mattered even more. How fast they would be able to depart from the island, in order to make it through the ‘closing borders’ of the ‘Balkan route’ became the central focus of

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the debates back then. In August 2015, during my first visit to Samos, I spoke to several people on the move that told me that they had paid a higher price to the boat facilitators in order to arrive on Samos because on this island the registration process was much faster and it was possible to leave the island the very same day of their arrival. On the contrary, on Lesvos because of the many arrivals and, (thus) departures from the island, the ferries were full, with people having to wait sometimes for over a week before managing to board the ferry. “On Lesvos you wait longer for the ferry”, was what I was told many times on Samos, during my visit that August in 2015. Already back then, ferries had become important instruments/reference points in shaping peoples’ experiences and relationships within the hotspot regime. As Mir who had travelled from Syria and who I briefly talked to in August 2015 on Samos, put it, On Lesvos we knew there was a chaos due to the large numbers of arrivals. The ticket to cross over to Lesvos was cheaper but we did not care about the money. For us time is more important than money. I mean to move on as fast as possible to Idomeni.

In addition, for some people on the move so many volunteers were present at the scene of their arrival on Lesvos was perceived as something positive “because it is something so encouraging, I mean the fact that they have travelled all this way to help us, makes us realize that Europe cares for refugees” (Personal Conversation with a refugee from Syria, March 2016, Lesvos). However, in the case of many Syrian refugees that I met on Samos, it was the police who they wanted to meet as soon as they arrived on the island. They knew that they were being expected by the police and, in turn, this is who they were requesting to meet in order to be able to move forward. As a young Syrian student from Damasks who had just arrived on the beach along with other Syrian refugees on Samos and who I encountered on the side street, in August 2015, told me, “if you want to help us please call the police and tell them that we have arrived. Otherwise tell us where the police station is, and we walk there ourselves right now”. How crowded were the registration centers, how many ferries departed during the week, if there was a direct ferry route to the port of Kavala in the Northern city of Greece (close to the border at Idomeni), that is, how fast they were able to move forward, all of which were tied to scenes of departure, reflects the fact that back then the Greek border

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islands were viewed by people on the move as spaces that would accelerate and even facilitate their mobility onwards to “Europe”; in other words, connecting points to “Europe”, as they were not yet fully operating prisons. As Dalin from Aleppo in Syria who I met during my second visit to Samos in November (2015), as soon as she received her registration paper from the police at the port, laughingly, highlighted to me, “the police (on Samos) just gave us a ticket to Germany”. This was not a direct ticket to Germany of course, neither did Dalin mean it as such. What she was referring to, was the fact that the police had given her a paper that facilitated her journey to the border from where she would make her way to Germany. With that paper, she could board the ferry to Kavala and from there get on a bus that would take her directly to the border, and the whole journey, as another Syrian refugee told me, “was legal”. The fact that different routes to different islands at different times were connected to distinct prices, leads to certain islands at specific moments “receiving” what a coastguard in the summer of 2015 on Lesvos referred to as “different types” of migrants arriving on different islands. For example, during the summer of 2015, Kos was known to be a ‘hostile island’ towards people on the move and migrants, with violent police authorities and bad reception conditions. During this time, therefore, the price for this island was the lowest, as one refugee from Syria told me on Samos in 2015. This meant that migrants and refugees who did not have enough money to cross over to a ‘better island’ had to take the route to Kos. Pakistani migrants many of which were coming from a dire economic background, in the summer of 2015 were arriving on Kos, and, thus, Kos was being constructed as the island that was receiving economic migrants and not ‘real’ refugees “that are well educated and wealthy families and students who speak English” (Personal Conversation with coastguard, summer of 2015, Lesvos). This of course has to do with the fact that on Kos the category of the ‘tourist’ (North European tourist coming mainly from the UK but not only) predominates as the central figure of the ‘foreigner’ that is welcomed because of the money that she brings. In other words, Kos being a popular destination for tourists arriving on cheap charter flights, the political authorities on the island were not at all interested in capitalizing on the ‘refugee’ category and turning the notion of solidarity into a commodity, a form of currency, as was in the case of Lesvos in 2015. On the contrary, perceiving the arrival of refugees as a threat to the island’s economy, the island’s authorities and the majority of

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the locals were speaking of ‘economic migrants’ and not refugees arriving on the island. In this way people arriving on Kos were detained upon arrival in a camp (that was about to become a hotspot) far away from the gaze of the tourist and to be deported shortly after.1 These new forms of bordering that were being introduced with the hotspot system only exacerbate the uneven geographies of “Europe”. In the Greek islands of Lesvos and Samos, local governments have largely acquiesced and accepted the transformation of their islands into “hotspots”, welcoming the arrival of assorted humanitarian agencies such as UNHCR, the Red Cross, and Doctors without Borders. In striking contrast, the local governments of other prospective Greek island “hotspots”, such as Kos and the small island of Agathonisi (near Leros), have persistently refused the implementation of “hotspot” camps and the installation of humanitarian NGOs, claiming that both the border policing and humanitarian functions will merely convert these islands into magnets attracting the arrival of more migrants and refugees on their shores and, consequently, damage the local tourism-driven economies. Hence, in the context of Greece’s economic “crisis”, authorities and many other local interests on these islands in 2015–2016 perceive the EU-ropeanization of their management of the “migration” and “refugee crisis” as simply another manifestation of a larger “European threat” that has devastated Greece’s economic viability, more generally. “From the standpoint of some of EU-rope’s beleaguered borderlands, therefore, the deepening integration of military tactics and humanitarian techniques reappears not as a “solution” to the “crisis” of the border but rather as one more series of measures that will further escalate the (double) “crisis”, the financial and the refugee crisis” (New Keywords Collective 2016, p. 19). With the implementation of the EU–Turkey Deal on the 20th of March 2016, people on the move found themselves stranded on the islands and risked being deported to Turkey. This new reality that had been imposed with the implementation of the hotspot mechanism was being translated to me by many people who had managed to make the Aegean crossing and were now stranded on the Greek island, as “Greece 1 See: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/14/kos-migrants-stadium-likea-prison-greek-island-refugees-immigration and https://www.theguardian.com/world/ 2015/sep/05/refugees-and-holidaymakers-in-kos-patrick-kingsley.

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has also closed its borders”. The statement that “Greece had closed its borders”, refers to Greece’s sea borders with Turkey; the fact that after the EU–Turkey Deal the crossing had become much more difficult as the Turkish coastguards were playing the good border guards along the lines of their government’s Deal with the EU. This statement, also, refers to the closures of borders in the Balkans and CEE. Thus, people on the move found themselves ‘locked up in Greece from all sides’, as Ege put it to me in February 2016. With the hotspot system fully operating by March 2016, new forms of migrants’ struggles, indeed, a ‘migration of struggles’ emerged (New Keywords: Migration and Borders 2015). People on the move were forced to move accordingly to where they are less likely to be arrested by the Turkish coastguards, or even change their route altogether by attempting to land on other Greek islands that do not operate as hotspots, or head directly by boat to a coast at the outskirts of Athens. On Samos and Lesvos, I came across with many people on the move who had made numerous attempts to cross over to the islands, but each time was stopped by the coastguards both Turkish and Greek who as soon as the Deal was implemented in March 2016 were collaborating in the governance of migration on the Aegean. On many occasions, this was done, I was told, in a violent manner that put their lives at risk. At the same time, I was informed by many families that they had been separated by Greek coastguards at sea. One Syrian family with three children told me that when they encountered the Greek coastguards at sea in April 2016, only the mother and the three children were given permission to board the coastguard’s vessel. The father along with the other men were told to return to Turkey. My three children and I were transferred on the coastguard’s vessel to Samos. But my husband was pushed back to Turkey. I was really concerned for his life and my youngest daughter was crying all day for her father. We waited alone on Samos camp for many days. After ten days my husband made it to Samos. He told me that he tried to cross six eight times, on the ninth time he made it thanks god. (Personal Conversation with Mina September 2016, Athens)

What Mina’s above words point out to, is how the hotspot mechanism governs migrants mobility “en route” to the Greek border islands. Specifically, in the above example, we see how people on the move

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are being governed along the lines of the “refugee/economic migrant” binary, as they are being separated into its distinct variations (e.g., ‘vulnerable subject’, single man, Syrian refugee), even before, arriving on the actual “hotspot island”. Migrants (first) encounter with “Europe” was being materialized through an ‘economy of violence’ (Walters 2015a), an economy that is reproductive of Europe’s unsteady geographies (in this case, the Greek border islands). As William Walters points out, The word encounter carries the connotation of an unexpected meeting, but also a struggle. If we take the view that governmentality is a readymade framework that merely needs to be applied to migration research, we leave little room for the encounter. For governmentality to encounter migration there needs to be change on both sides: what we understand by governmentality should itself be modified and enhanced by the meeting with migration problems. (2015a, p. 4)

As migrants become caught up within this ‘economy of violence’, and, indeed, decide on which island they will land (on), the hotspot mechanism is forced to catch up with their autonomous routes (Mezzadra 2011). This ‘catching up’ is translated into the official state discourse and media representation of “sudden increase in refugees’ arrivals on the island of Chios”, or “refugees and migrants were intercepted outside Kastelorizo island (a non-hotspot island”, for example). In this sense, there was also a hotspotization of the neighbouring islands and the sea (routes), such that “each hotspot was being extended to encompass a wider geography as its operational jurisdiction, and in effect reconfiguring the wider Aegean region as a border zone newly organized around the designated hotspots”. At the same time, if the ‘hotspot approach’ aims at a remapping of whole island territories in order to achieve homogenization of migration management at Europe’s frontiers, that is, “to stop something different happening on each island and the Greek authorities doing whatever they like”, as local Greek officer working at the hotspot on Samos told me on the 10th of March 2016, then, migrants and refugees’ autonomous routes to a specific island, challenge this attempt for homogenization. The migration ‘crisis’ from this perspective, then, “is a crisis of management: a crisis of an administrative, technocratic, or bureaucratic order” (Carastathis 2018a, p. 144).

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The above discussion on the Aegean crossing(s) along the trajectories of the implementation of the hotspots up until the date of the signature of the EU–Turkey Deal (March 20, 2016) reveals that along with the distinct migrants’ experiences, unsteady geographies of the hotspot regime can be traced even before the migrants arrive on the islands, that is, on the Aegean passage from Turkey to Greece. Exactly because the conditions and border practices of each hotspot differ, migrants being aware of this from previous travellers or by the facilitators on their journey, often get to “choose” which island they would prefer to disembark on. “Some islands are more expensive than others”, a migrant from Pakistan on Lesvos in March 2016, pointed out to me. Each island has a standard price depending not so much on its distance from the Turkish coast, as one would imagine but on “how easy it is to depart from that island for Athens” or to cross the other border, as the same migrant from Pakistan put it, referring to the “internal” border that exists between the Greek islands and the mainland. How easy and fast it is to board the ferry for Athens speaks of the specific border practices and conditions characterizing the “hotspot” on each island, that is, the ‘hotspot reality’. And with specific conditions, as we have seen, refers to everything that forms part of what Ruben Anderson calls the “border industry”: coastguards, Frontex, border officials, police, UNHCR staff, EASO staff, NGOs, volunteers and activists. I should point out here that once the hotspot was fully operating on the island, the price to reach it from Turkey rose, as it was thought that the registration/identification/fingerprinting process would become faster. “Why migrants decide to land on a specific island instead of others is something that challenges Frontex’s definition of migrant routes as driven by smugglers and the EU’s terms of “mixed migratory flows, which are largely linked to the smuggling of migrants”, and/as it grants migrants empirical and conceptual autonomy” (Spathopoulou 2016).

“We Run to the Border When the Whole City Runs”2 The gradual rebordering of European territories according to the logic of the hotspot is linked to what I refer to as the ‘hotspotization of the

2 A slogan that prefaces the wall of Moria hotspot and that I came across with in early March 2016.

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road’. With the concept of the ‘hotspotization of the road’, I reflect on the ways in which migrants and refugees were literally “arrested in transit” (Stierl 2017), “en route”, as they were making their way to Idomeni from the Greek islands (and then through the ‘Balkan route’). As the Greek government was struggling to catch up with the February 2015 deadline to have all five hotspots operating, certain migrant nationalities that were deemed as ‘deserving refugees’, such as Syrians, were pushed forward to the border at Idomeni while others were gradually being blocked and impeded from moving forward, and, thus, rendering them vulnerable on the road, as they made their way up to the northern border (see also Avgeri 2016). The implementation of the EU–Turkey Deal and with all five hotspot fully operating, goes hand in hand with the ‘walling’ of the Aegean and the “closing borders” of the Balkan route, that led, to the gradual blockage of so-called refugees’ mobility on the road, that is, the criminalization of even those migrant nationalities that fulfil the criteria of the ‘deserving refugee’. ‘Hotspotization’ speaks of how spaces are being transformed through a crisis logic and how the hotspot as a process of bordering and governmentality around the Greek islands shapes peoples’ mobility, relationships and sense of time. In other words, hotspotization is about time just as it is about space. More specifically, it is a process, the hotspot process, where space is governed through time and time through space. This violent intermingling of space with the time was felt on the overcrowded ferries, in queues outside ticket offices on Lesvos and Samos (where I was during this time) and in peoples’ movements; people were in a hurry to make it to the border in time. It really did feel that the whole city was running to the border, and I remember feeling compelled to do the same (and so I did). As Anna Carastathis has insightfully pointed out, “time matters in crisis” (Carastathis 2018a). Time, also, matters and shapes relationships, especially those whose point of reference is the border, I realize now.

There was something violent in the atmosphere and the increased presence of the police in various locations along the ‘road’, as they transformed whole ports, ferries, buses and squares into informal hotspots, even if they were not officially operating as hotspots: “the refugee housing squats in occupied buildings in the Exarchia and Viktoria square neighbourhoods of Athens; and the more established migrant communities

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in Platia Amerikis and Kypseli in Athens—all of these spaces, in addition to the islands, which are conflated with the reception and detention centres they ‘host’ are being ‘informally’ managed as hotspots”. Along these lines, I argue, the police took control over/invaded both peoples’ space and time by creating the impression that there was a race to run from Lesvos to Idomeni, a race with winners and losers (through which only the fittest would survive). This imposed atmosphere of urgency and competitiveness at a higher level was being produced by governments of European member states who were eager to close the borders and, thus, were threatening to exclude all migrant nationalities from entering northern European countries through the Balkan route. “These people are capable of sacrificing their own mother in order to reach Germany” I heard a policeman say on Samos in August 2015. “Why are these men not staying behind in Syria to fight for their motherland”, a shop-owner asked me on Lesvos in March 2016. “They are hostile to one another. I have seen Syrians who refused to board the same bus for the border with Afghanis” was what a bus-driver told me in Athens in late January 2016. Such narratives reflect the racist and patriarchal structures that permit the Greek police not only to indulge in such comments but to also enact violence towards the people on the move. In relation to ‘hotspotization’, we can speak of an ‘atmospheric violence’ of urgency that dominated the landscape of the ‘refugee crisis’ at this particular moment in Greece. Here I draw upon Anna Carastathis’s (2018b) discussion around the “atmosphericity of violence under conditions of intersecting crises” in the Greek Mediterranean context. Her analysis turns to the thinkers Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw (1991) and Angela Harris (1990) who “conceptualize the atmosphericity of violence as inextricably linked to the existence of multiple, interwoven systems of oppression. The fragmentation of violence, and its subsequent obfuscation as atmospheric, is due to an essentialist, reductionist and authoritarian categorization, the derivative of false mutual exclusions based on misogyny and racism” (p. 7: my translation from Greek into English). FAC speaks of the “ever more naturalised atmosphere of violence, which, to oppressive systems is like oxygen, whilst it suffocates us”.3

3 https://feministresearch.org/intersectionality/.

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People were running to the border from all directions and from different geographies and roots, coming and going to and from various geopolitical, social movement and gender locations. In this sense, we can argue that the notion of ‘mixed migration flows’ is used not only to divide ‘refugees’ from ‘economic migrants’ by reference to racialized nationalities and degrees of deservingness but, also, to separate those crossing the Aegean from other subjects that are coinciding or moving with the “flows”, on the Greek border islands; towards Idomeni: volunteers, activists, grassroots organizations, the so-called ‘solidarians’ of the ‘refugee crisis’. This division of the flow of solidarity at the border was constructed around various competing discourses in relation to the ‘refugee crisis’ that in turn the state and supranational entities materialized with the hotspot approach. The hotspot as a neocolonial formation incorporates at its core the colonial logic of rule and divide in racialized and gendered ways. “It is a racializing device, as evinced in the notion of ‘mixed migration flows’ that formed the pretext for the introduction of the hotspot in the first place, insofar as the term “mixed”, introduces an ambiguity that commands scrutiny, differentiation and ultimately differential treatment” (Spathopoulou, et al. forthcoming). And, thus, we started to compete with one another at the border. We run to the border when the whole city runs. We have no other choice than to trust and go with the flow. But we must run together and remain together. –If I refuse to run to the border what will happen? I ask. –It means that you don’t trust me. He responds. –But I trust the flow. Silence – I told you, I am not the flow, he insisted. (Dialogue titled “Do you trust me?” based on various conversations that I had with Ege on Lesvos and Athens between March and July 2016).

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Conclusion People don’t just flow. They stumble upon obstacles; they are stopped at and by borders; they are pushed back and pushed forward and then again pushed back and stopped, sometimes forever. Relationships don’t just flow. They stumble upon obstacles; are stopped at and by borders, sadly by our own feelings that become borders. Research doesn’t just flow. It stumbles upon feelings and is stopped, sometimes forever like the people it engages with and feels for. I travelled to Turkey to search for my roots. To find a home. After five years of living in Turkey, I returned to Greece, where I did not feel at home anymore. And, thus, I arrived on Lesvos, “at the crossroad” (Anzaldúa 1987) only to depart once again. I have learned to trust the ‘flow’. I have, also, realized that rather than my roots it is the route that is my home. A route that takes many forms, a journey by ferry from Ayvalik (Turkey) to Lesvos (Greece) and back, a friendship, a more intimate relationship, a separation. Go back to Greece, you are Greek, a migrant PhD researcher must always make their home the focus of their research, especially when their home is burning. Greece is burning, your home has become a hotspot, and your topic is really hot, is what I learned when I began my PhD studies in London. And thus the route became the subject of my research. In 2015, on the Aegean border, if Ege became a prisoner of his route, then I became a prisoner of my research. You see, he told me, when I crossed the Aegean, I became the legitimate subject of your research. (Based on what Ege told me in May 2016 in Athens regarding my research and his relation to research and researchers in general.)

References Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands/La frontera: The new mestiza. Anzaldúa, G. (2015). 2. Flights of the Imagination. In Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro (pp. 23–46). Duke University Press. Apostolova, Raia. (2016). The Real Appearance of the Economic/Political Binary: Claiming Asylum in Bulgaria. Intersections: East European Journal of Society and Politics, 2(4): 33–50. Avgeri, D. (2016). Reflections on Temporality as a Technique of Governing Migration: Authoritarian and Liberal Variations from Greece’s Recent Past, Presented

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at King’s College Workshop: “Questioning the Cartographies and Temporalities of Migration”. London. Bousiou, A., and Papada, E. (2020). Introducing the EC Hotspot Approach: A Framing Analysis of EU’s Most Authoritative Crisis Policy Response. International Migration, 58(6): 139–152. https://doi.org/10.1111/imig. 12689. Carastathis, Anna. (2018a). Nesting Crises. Women’s Studies International Forum, 68: 142–148. Carastathis, Anna. (2018b). The Atmosphericity of Violence Under Conditions of Intersecting Crises by Anna Carastathis. Feministiqa, 1: 6–15. Carastathis, Anna, Spathopoulou, Aila, and Tsilimpounidi, Myrto. (2018). Crisis, What Crisis? Immigrants, Refugees, and Invisible Struggles. Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugees, 34(1): 29–38. Casas-Cortes, M., Cobarrubias, S., De Genova, N., Garelli, G., Grappi, G., Heller, C., Hess, S., Kasparek, B., Mezzadra, S., Neilson, B., and Peano, I. (2015). New Keywords: Migration and Borders. Cultural Studies, 29(1): 55–87. Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams. (1991). Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6): 1241–1299. De Genova, Nicholas. (2016). The European Question: Migration, Race, and Postcoloniality in Europe. Social Text, 34(3): 75–102. European Commission. (2015). Explanatory Note on the Hotspot Approach. http://www.statewatch.org/news/2015/jul/eu-com-hotsposts.pdf. Foucault, M. (1988). Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. New York: Vintage Books. Harris, A. P. (1990). Race and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Theory. Stanford Law Review, 42(3): 581–616. Mezzadra, Sandro. (2011). The Gaze of Autonomy: Capitalism, Migration and Social Struggles. Published in Squire, V. (ed.), The Contested Politics of Mobility: Borderzones and Irregularity. London: Routledge, pp. 121–143. New Keywords Collective. (2016). Europe/Crisis: New Keywords of ‘the Crisis’ in and of ‘Europe’. Zone Books. Papoutsi, A., Painter, J., Papada, E., and Vradis, A. (2018). The EC Hotspot Approach in Greece: Creating Liminal EU Territory. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 45(12): 2200–2212. https://doi.org/10.1080/136 9183X.2018.1468351. Spathopoulou, Aila. (2016). The Ferry as a Mobile Hotspot: Migrants at the Uneasy Borderlands of Greece. Society & Space, 8 November. Accessed at http://societyandspace.org/2016/12/15/the-ferry-as-a-mobilehotspot-migrants-at-the-uneasy-borderlands-of-greece/, on 5 July 2017.

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Spathopoulou, A., Carastathis, A., and Tsilimpounidi, M. (2020). ‘Vulnerable Refugees’ and ‘Voluntary Deportations’: Performing the Hotspot, Embodying Its Violence. Geopolitics: 210–232. Stierl, M. (2017). Excessive Migration Excessive Governance: Border Entanglements in Greek EU-rope, Forthcoming. In de Genova, Nicholas (eds.), The Borders of ‘Europe’: Autonomy of Migration Tactics of Bordering. Duke University Press. Van Houtum, H., & Bueno Lacy, R. (2020). The Migration Map Trap. On the Invasion Arrows in the Cartography of Migration. Mobilities, 15(2): 196–219. Walters, William. (2015a). Reflections on Migration and Governmentality. Movements. Journal Für kritische Migrations- Und Grenzregimeforschung, 1(1). Walters, William. (2015b). On the Road with Michel Foucault: Migration, Deportation, and Viapolitics. In Fuggle, Sophie, Lanci, Yari, Tazzioli, Martina (eds.), Foucault and the History of Our Present. Houndmills, pp. 94–110. Wissink, M., Düvell, F., & van Eerdewijk, A. (2013). Dynamic Migration Intentions and the Impact of Socio-Institutional Environments: A Transit Migration Hub in Turkey. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 39(7): 1087–1105.

CHAPTER 3

Setting the Scene of the Hotspot

From Athens In early November 2015, I was having lunch at a restaurant in the centre of Athens, with Nikos and Pedro, two friends who are working as Arabic and Farsi interpreters for the NGO Doctors of the World. Since the advent of the “refugee crisis”, in the summer of 2015, Doctors of the World, has been running various programs and projects that provide medical care to different groups of refugees in various ‘hotspot sites’ in Greece, including Athens. As we were discussing, the conversation turned to Nikos and his ambivalent legal status in Greece. While Nikos was born and grew up in Greece (his parents migrated from Egypt to Greece in the late 1970s), he is still not recognized by the Greek state as a Greek citizen. His legal status is that of the “second generation migrant” that provides him with a residence and working permit, a permit that must be renewed every five years, at the yearly cost of 150 euros. Pedro, on the other hand, had travelled from Afghanistan to Greece in 2005 and applied for asylum in Athens. He only received his refugee status in October 2015. For years his asylum claim had been pending and, thus, he was forced to visit every six months the police who during those years were responsible for handling asylum claims in order to renew, what in those days was referred to as the “pink card”, that is, the asylum applicant’s card (footnote here?). © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Spathopoulou, Bordering and Governmentality Around the Greek Islands, Mobility & Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08589-5_3

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Back to our conversation, Pedro was astonished by the fact that even though Nikos had been born in Greece, he was still not recognized as a Greek citizen. In a joking mood he said the following; Refugees that are arriving now are immediately getting papers, I never received my papers so fast, you will see, they will get the Greek citizenship before us! Maybe you should go to a Greek island, and get on boat, and play the refugee who has just landed, I think you will move through the procedure faster than you are now.

To Pedro’s comments, Nikos replied laughingly, you don’t complain, you are, also, much better off than me, you are a refugee, whereas I am a migrant. But you better hurry to get the Greek citizenship because when the war in Syria ends, you will see, they will tell all these people to return back to Syria, so watch out they don’t tell you the same; they won’t care if you are from Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan or Syria; if New Democracy 1 returns to power, for them all refugees are the same, they won’t differentiate between Syrians, Afghanis, Iraqis, Kurdish, like is happening now, they will just say all refugees, or rather, all illegal immigrants must return back to where they came from, the war has ended!.

And then turning to me, laughingly Nikos finalized with the following words: “and you even as a tourist might be deported along with all the other foreigners” (‘allothapos’ is the Greek term he used). I begin this chapter with a conversation between two friends in Athens, the one identifying as a migrant and the other as a refugee and myself who was being referred to as a ‘tourist’, in order to understand how our positionalities in Athens were being situated in relation to the scene of refugees’ arrival on Lesvos. Pedro and Nikos viewed the refugee crisis’s

1 The New Democracy, also referred to as ND by its initials, is a liberal-conservative political party in Greece. In modern Greek politics, New Democracy has been the main centre-right political party. New Democracy was in opposition during the first phase (2009–2011) of the Greek government debt crisis which included the First bailout package agreed in May 2010. In May 2012 general election, the New Democracy regained the largest party but could not obtain a majority. Anti-austerity leftist SYRIZA, led by Alexis Tsipras became the second largest party and refused to negotiate with New Democracy and PASOK. After the general election, the New Democracy could not form a coalition government. New Democracy during its rule introduced a strict immigration policy and proposed strengthening this policy as part of its political agenda.

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scene of arrival from Athens as a threshold, a temporal border, that distinguished the ‘newcomers’ experiences from their own experience of arrival in Greece. As Pedro told me many times, when he arrived in Greece (in the early 2000s), except the police, there was nobody waiting for him on the island’s shores. No crisis was announced, no scenes of arrival were staged and no protagonists were photographed and ‘welcomed’. During my conversation with Nikos and Pedro, I felt that through the scene of refugees’ arrival a spatio-temporal border between various precarious groups was being imposed. A few months later, this border would materialize spatially with the EU–Turkey Deal and the geographical restriction of all arriving migrants to the five hotspot islands. An internal border was being mapped out between Athens and Lesvos that cut through peoples’ view of Lesvos from the mainland. The border between ‘newcomers’ and ‘older migrants’ that was being performed through the scene of arrival in 2015 was narrated by my friends as a differential treatment along the lines of “there was no crowd awaiting our arrival”. Peoples’ asylum claims and papers more generally, were being processed through different legal speeds, so that someone from Syria who arrived in 2015 could be relocated within a couple of months to another EU member state, while somebody like Nikos, who was born in Greece was still waiting to obtain the Greek passport. If, however, the scene of arrival formed a division within the ‘migrant mob’ (Tazzioli 2017) what united their experiences, as we discern from the above conversation, is the threat of eminent deportation. Nikos and Pedro were aware that anytime they could be ordered to return to their ascribed country of origin. The air they breathed consisted of an ‘atmospheric violence’ of temporariness. A system that criminalizes whole groups of people in order to discipline them, and disciplines them in order to eventually deport them. Whilst incarceration of the prisoner is underpinned by the idea that she will be disciplined into a ‘good citizen’ and returned to society, detention of the migrant envisions as the outcome the further displacement/removal from the national society that imposes it: she will eventually return or be returned to her ‘country of origin’ or citizenship. As Karlos who we met on Samos in the previous chapter, pointed out to me a few months later, “the good migrant is thought of as the one who eventually returns”. What about the ‘good researcher’, I wondered. Should she eventually return?

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Even you one day will return to where you came from. None of us belong here. Eventually, when the crisis is over, both of us will leave but towards different directions. Does this depend on which direction my research will take? (Notes from my diary titled: “The good researcher”, 10th of August, 2015).

There were times that I felt that Nikos and Pedro were grabbing on to my own questionable ‘Greekness’, which was the result of my mother being a ‘foreigner’, my appearance and my accent, in order to connect with me. “Congratulations, you speak very well Greek” is something that I have been hearing since I was a child from ‘real’ Greeks who assume that I am a ‘foreigner’, and always begin a conservation with me in English. Such incidents are intensified on the Greek islands where I am initially viewed as a tourist on vacation, along the lines of race and gender. Ironically, what brought me closer to Nikos and Pedro and to people with ‘migrant backgrounds’, was our shared experience and feeling of incomplete belonging in Greece. Our presence in the country, albeit for different reasons, was perceived as being temporary, that we would eventually depart from Greece, whether by our own accord or forcefully. This perception that draws upon racial and gendered lines affected our involvement in the solidarity movement of 2015–2016. It is important to question, in other words, what kind of alliances are formed within futures of potential imposed return? Just to give one example, very often by the Greek local solidarians, we were approached as coming from the other side of the border; Nikos and Pedro from where the refugees were thought as coming from and myself from where the international volunteers were perceived as arriving from. And, thus, on many occasions and solidarity spaces our involvement was deemed as being temporary and, in my case, often conflated with the so-called voluntourism that was attributed to many short-term volunteers who had come to help in the ‘refugee crisis’. Contrary to the ‘real activists’ we were not taken seriously, and, in some cases, we were even dealt with suspicion. Due to our appearance, accent, gender and legal status, ‘locals’ expected us to leave. And sure, enough I always did leave. All my life I have struggled to prove that I am not a tourist, I wrote in my diary on the 1st of April 2016.

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–I am not a tourist. I will not leave you. –But you did leave me. Many times. So, you are a tourist. –But I returned. And I will keep returning. –So, then you are a volunteer. –No, I am not a volunteer. I am an activist. (Dialogue titled “No, I am not a tourist” that I created based on various conversations that I had with people at the border).

From Lesvos They weren’t expecting to encounter someone educated and that spoke English. (Ege, March 2016, Lesvos) I wasn’t expecting to meet someone like him. (note from my diary, 3rd March 2016)

In the above excerpts, we come across various expectations from people on both sides of the Aegean border regarding the scene of arrival. From those who crossed the Aegean and from those who were waiting for them to arrive, who had crossed other borders because they were expecting their arrival on the shores of Lesvos. Ege was aware that by joining the ‘flow’ and embarking on the route across the Aegean to Greece, he was entering the theatrical play of the ‘refugee crisis’ and that due to his nationality, he would have to spend extra effort to prove he deserved a ‘welcoming Europe’; to count as a ‘deserving refugee’. “Don’t you get that a stage has been set up on Lesvos”? he told me in March 2016. It is important to remember my own expectations from Lesvos and from the people who were arriving from the opposite shore. I look through my diary notes and I fall upon my surprise at who I encountered at the border on Lesvos. As we see from the above epigraph, I had written down that I was not expecting to meet someone from Baluchistan. In my mind was imprinted the image of the Syrian family, so much I had associated the scene of arrival on Lesvos with the Syrian crisis. I had never heard before about Baluchistan or even knew that such a place existed;

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perhaps, exactly because it is not represented on hegemonic maps as an independent country. In the desire to make the other’s world your home, it is at the border that you must choose whether you are entering as a migrant or as an occupier, I write in my diary in October 2015.

From that very moment of my encounter with Ege was I giving in to some colonial desires and excitement of discovering a new land and people on Lesvos? As Ege pointed out to me, he understood once he arrived on Lesvos, that, while the Greek state was using the ‘refugee crisis card’ to call for humanitarian support towards the Syrian refugees, the EU was using it to intervene at Greece’s borders, forcing the Greek government to perform better its role as Europe’s border guard against so-called economic migrants, like Ege (who was being identified as a Pakistani and hence economic migrant). Ege claimed that the volunteers were not expecting him to arrive, however, it turned out that the state was. The feeling that he was being used by the Greek state, a feeling that Ege would internalize and project onto those who wanted to help him in the months to come, was seeded into him from the very moment of his arrival. Being racialized as an undeserving economic migrant upon his arrival on Lesvos, even before he was officially registered as a Pakistani at the hotspot, due to his skin colour and accent, Ege ended up embodying feelings of un-deservingness in his daily interactions with people at the border. But who and what do you want to be? Was a question that I frequently asked Ege and other people who I encountered at the border islands on the Aegean. As I put this question into written words, it sounds as a repetition of the all too familiar question that our parents and other ‘grown ups’ asked us when we were children: What will you be when you grow up?

The question implies that it is a matter of choice, even though ironically, what usually follows by the ‘grown up’, is the imposition of a distinction between good and bad choices and what route he believes the child should take in order to count as a ‘real’, a ‘mature adult’.

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My family wanted me to cross the Aegean. So, I crossed. My family wants me to leave Greece. But I stayed. And, thus, I asked: But what do you want? Silence (Dialogue titled “What will you be when you grow up”, that created based on various dialogues that I had with people on the move in March–April 2016 on Lesvos).

“I Am the Camp” Until the end of 2015, migrants who landed on Greek islands were quickly identified in the hotspots. Although the registration was not compulsory, it was the condition for migrants to get a temporary permit of one or six months to transit through Greece and to take the ferry to Athens. The inside–outside circulation through the hotspots, in other words, was relatively quick for those perceived as refugees, who did not usually remain more than a few days on the islands (see also Tazzioli 2018), however, slower for those deemed as economic migrants and who were forced to remain for a longer time at the camp, in order to receive a temporary permit of one month with which they could leave the island (unless, as we shall see they were declared by the police a ‘threat to public order and safety’). Ege arrived on the shores of Lesvos in early November 2015 where he boarded a UNHCR bus that transferred him and his co-travellers to the hotspot camp at Moria. Ege explained to me that while Syrians and Iraqis were being registered at the Kara Tepe camp, all other nationalities were being transported (like Ege) to the camp at Moria, which had started to operate as a hotspot one month prior to this arrival, in October 2015. While, at the beginning of November when Ege arrived, all nationalities were able to leave the islands, departures from the border islands were not taking place within the same temporality. Additionally, those who were arriving were being registered in different camps. Phenomenological work has outlined how structures of power allow bodies to inhabit space differently, enabling some to move with ease while fixing others in place (Ahmed 2006; Fanon 1967 in Heney 2020, p. 16).

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When I visited Samos in December 2015, amidst the various preparations for the setting up of the hotspot infrastructure, the differential treatment regarding the Syrian refugees compared to other nationalities was evident, as it was being materialized both spatially and temporarily. As soon as I set foot on the island’s main port, Vathi, I encountered several African migrants who appeared to be exhausted and had a look of despair on their faces. “We have been abandoned here. We have been told by the police to wait, that we cannot leave from here, until they take us to the camp”. When I asked at the Hellenic coastguard’s office, why were they keeping these people (still in their wet clothes and without food or water) out in the cold to wait, one coastguard, replied with the following: “We have been told to deal with the “refugee issue”. Do these guys over there look to you like refugees?”. In shock, I exited the building. These were the black bodies, the ‘remnants’ of the ‘refugee crisis’ on the Aegean that did not matter, as those bodies belonged to the obscene of the ‘crisis’. In the context of the Central Mediterranean border crossing the “dead black and brown bodies awash on the halcyon shores of the Mediterranean Sea” (De Genova, 2018, p. 1765), belong to another crisis, the ‘migration crisis’, as they are racially constructed as ‘migrant bodies’. Later that day on Samos, I discovered that Syrians were being transferred and registered at the Karlovasi port, and, from there they were directly boarding the ferry for Kavala, a town in Northern Greece. Haydar, an activist from Iran who had been living for many years on Samos, and, who, along with Shaw from Ireland, were supporting refugees and migrants at a time when the big organizations and international NGOs had not yet arrived, complained that volunteers were not paying attention to the camp where all other nationalities were forced to remain in and that was gradually being transformed into the newly operating hotspot. Haydar and Shaw would gather items for those stuck in the camp because the camp was lacking in basic items and facilities. It is important to point out here that the ‘camp’ that Haydar is referring to is a camp that a few months later, would start to operate as a hotspot, as it expanded and developed into the infrastructure of the hotspot. Specifically, Haydar told me the following: As long as I have been on this island, there has always been a camp, sometimes many camps. My first experience on Samos was being imprisoned in a camp for more than six months. And now I am still dealing with the camp, as my brothers and sisters are still forced to remain in a camp for weeks. Everyone

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believes that refugees are free to depart immediately from the island because they think that they are only refugees from Syria arriving on Samos.

“This place still makes me shiver”, was what Haydar had told me, one day as we watched the construction workers setting up the hotspot infrastructure, upon the memories of a space of containment that still haunts those who have been held in prison-islands and who now find themselves assisting the authorities with their translation labour in the management of the camp. –“I am the camp”, a close friend from Afghanistan, Douglas who had lived for several months between 2015 and 2016 at the informal camp that had been set up in the Olive Grove outside Moria hotspot, on Lesvos told me. –Come on, I responded to him. You are much more than the camp. –So is the camp, he remarked. (Dialogue titled “I am the camp” based on various conversations that I had with Douglas during the years between 2016 and 2018 on Lesvos and Athens).

The figure of the police in deciding who is allowed to depart immediately from the island and who not, who must remain in a camp and who not, “who is disposable and who is not” (Mbembe 2003), becomes clear through the uneven relationship between the police and the refugees/migrants. While Syrian refugees as soon as they landed on the shores of the island, asked to be arrested in order to expedite the identification process, and their release from the island, a ticket onto the ferry, other migrant nationalities that I encountered appeared to be more reluctant, suspicious and even scared at the thought of the police and being arrested. Yunus who moved from Morocco fifteen years earlier and who has been living on Samos for twelve years told me that during the many times that the police called him to help with translation issues regarding ‘the newcomers’, twice he witnessed a policeman beating up migrants: once, a person from Somalia and the other time, a migrant from Algeria. In both cases, they had asked the police officer when they would be able to receive the identification paper and leave. In Yunus’s words, The police do what they like, there is no law here. And while they have changed towards the Syrians they continue to act the same with other nationalities,

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as they were previously treating refugees before SYRIZA came into power. (Personal Conversation with Yunus, August 2015, Samos)

A newly arrived migrant from Nigeria, Mahmut, who we I met outside the ‘camp’ in Vathi on Samos island, and who had been waiting for seven days to receive the registration paper with which he could leave the island, told me that. with us, it is really up to the police; they can let you go immediately or keep you in the camp for days just to show they have control over us … We don’t know what to expect from them (the police). While, they give papers immediately to Syrians they push as in a corner and tell us to wait. We remain in the camp for days before we can get registered and all we hear from the police are screaming and curses. We don’t know when we will be allowed to leave, and, it is really up to the police, if we can board the same day the ferry… And unlike other nationalities, we cannot play it ‘Syrians’ because of the colour of our skin; this is racism all over again. (Personal Conversation with Mahmut, August 2015, Samos)

Indeed, throughout my fieldwork, I realized that in many cases people from other nationalities used the tactic to pretend they are Syrians. It was particularly successful especially with the ones who could speak Arabic and ‘look like’ Syrians to the Greek police officers. When I tried to understand what a Syrian looks like to the gaze of the Greek police, I realized the implementation of the “colour line” and their references to the degrees of whiteness. “This explains why Frontex begun to hire interpreters at different borders areas of landing and crossing, such as the Greek islands and Idomeni, in order to track down—through detection of ‘accents’ and ‘dialects’—those who were merely posing as ‘Syrians’—that is as ‘proper refugees’. In another conversation, Yunus told me that the police “take their anger out on these poor migrants from Africa and Pakistan. Because they have to play it good to the Syrians”. In relation to Yunus’s comment we can argue, therefore, that “the police was, also performing a role according to the “refugee crisis” script, that of the benevolent and humanitarian border force, the helpful hand pointing the legitimate Syrian ‘refugee’ toward Alemania” (Spathopoulou et al. forthcoming). Only that the same hand at any moment could point toward the opposite direction or even push you back to sea. Routes to and from the border are shaped, therefore, by the intense presence of the police. So are encounters at the border; some of which are

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blocked by the police through encampment and other forms of imprisonment while others develop under its gaze, at the hotspot, in the camp, at the port, on the ferry, in the square, the city streets. In addition, the police’s racist and sexist comments formulate the chorus of every dialogue between people who genuinely want to get to know each other at the border. Indeed, at the location of the border, every time I would relate to a person there was always a point that I would have to turn to and interact with the police to navigate a situation, to move on, to remain put, to board a ferry with the person(s). At the border relationships depend on and are frequently mediated by the police; relationships don’t just flow. In my diary on the 15th of June 2016, I ask: How can authentic relationships flourish under the gaze of the police? How can authentic research flourish when it is mediated by the police? (footnote here on current situation with research that needs to be regulated).

The Evicted Self During the early days of our time together, Ege recounted to me his journey from Moria hotspot on Lesvos to the border at Idomeni, from there his forced transportation by bus to the stadium in Athens, his escape from the stadium and into the anarchist neighbourhood of Exarchia (in Athens) and from there back to the border on Lesvos. Ege’s trajectories reveal a multi-directionality of mobility within Greece, as he moves from one border to the other, from the border to the city and back. At the same time, Ege’s journey (within Greece) reflects a trajectory from legality to illegality, as his thirty-day registration paper that enabled him to leave Lesvos expired ‘on the road’. Or as Ege put it, I “didn’t realize how fast the thirty days passed and that the borders were closing”. His words encapsulate what I discussed in the previous chapter as the ‘hotspotization of the road’, an atmosphere of violent urgency and hurriedness, a feeling that if one is not fast enough, she will not make it and will not arrive at her desired destination. We understand, moreover, how time itself comes to be subjected to the partitioning of people on the move, and the regimentation of deserving and undeserving-ness (Avgeri 2016). Emotions, such as love, anger, fear and desires that are tied to border struggles can also push people forward and immobilize them. Isabel Meier (2020) illustrates how affective border violence works through occupying emotional and mental space by creating an overwhelming amount of what

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she terms emotional borderwork. In relation to the UK context, she argues that “discomfort, unease, worry, shame and fear are emotional aspects of asylum seekers daily lives in quite specific ways: the endless waiting for their claim to be processed, collecting money at the local post office, reporting to the Home Office, but also in their homes, relationships and friendships” (p.1). Meier shows, moreover, how people seeking asylum negotiate affective border violence through re-claiming bodily and temporal space. Similarly, I argue as people on the move became subjected to the “affective border violence”, as they struggle with and through their feelings to move forward from the Aegean border islands to the Greek Macedonian border at Idomeni, re-claim through these very same emotions fear and shame bodily and temporal space. In this sense it is, also, emotions that direct bodies to turn away or towards certain directions, or what Ahmed (2006) refers to as ‘lines of movement’. Such lines of movement challenge the hegemonically constructive narrative that I spoke about in Chapter One, and which represents people on the move as unstopping ‘migration flows’ moving towards one direction, usually from south to north. I remember Ege telling me that, “when I finally decided to leave and go further” the borders for Pakistanis had closed. “Why did you decide to leave Lesvos?”, I asked him. “Because everybody was leaving”, he responded. Indeed, as I mentioned before Ege’s mother was pushing him to go further, because she felt ashamed that the sons of her friends had already reached Germany, while her son was still on Lesvos helping volunteers for free, as she put it to me during a skype call that we had with her. Ege was being emotionally pressured to move on. Here, I would like to argue how processes of bordering such as the gradual closing borders along the Balkan route, in the case of the months leading up to March 2016, intensified certain gender positions by compelling those who seek to cross the borders and who identify as ‘men’ to perform and prove certain kinds of masculinities (see also Newhouse 2021). “I was expected either to marry and create a family in Pakistan or to migrate to Europe and send money back to my already existing family. Otherwise, they would consider me a loser, not a real man”, was what Ege had told me. Indeed, many other young people that I met during that time on Lesvos and Samos and who identified as ‘men’, expressed the fear that if they did not manage to cross the borders and reach what they considered to be the ‘real Europe’ (e.g., Germany, Sweden, Norway,

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Netherlands), and were forced to remain in a semi-European space (e.g., Greece), they would not be considered ‘real men’ . –By whom? I had asked a young person from Pakistan and who identified as a man. –By my family, my friends, my teachers, by the border-guards, by everyone. And there is nothing worse than seeing a policeman laugh at you when you are turned away from the border. But I will show him who the real man is. He responded.

In relation to the above short dialogue, the following questions emerge: What happens when one overidentifies with their gendered position at the border and the assumptions around masculinity that it entails? When exposed to the border and racial violence, does one use gender privilege/entitlement as a weapon against such violence? Audre Lorde (1984) has taught us that “exacerbated by racism and the pressures of powerlessness, violence against Black women and children often becomes a standard within our communities, one by which manliness can be measured” (p. 61). Borders kill, you told me. But so does gender, I respond. So, you must also refuse the violence of gender, otherwise your struggle against borders will be incomplete. I conclude. Do you want me to be killed at the border? (A dialogue titled: “Stop killing me” that I created based on a conversation that I had with Ege in April 2016 on Lesvos and that was repeated many times in the following years. Inspired also by Harsha Walia’s analysis of ‘border imperialism’ in Undoing Border Imperialism (2014) and Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa work Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987).

Marios from Morocco, whom I met on Samos in December 2015, told me that when the borders closed for North-Africans and he was not able to move forward, he didn’t know how to explain this to his older brothers who had lent him money for his journey. “I have let them down as a younger brother by being stuck in Greece. If I knew the borders were going to close, I would have moved faster”, is what he said to me.

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From the above, we see how Greece becomes a location whose ‘Europeaness’ is questionable by the people on the move and, thus, is perceived as a space of transit rather than a desired destination. Along these lines, one’s arrival in Greece does not count as the completion of the journey. It is this feeling of incompleteness, that is, also, part of the “affective border violence” (Meier 2020) that I discussed above, and which distorts one’s sense of self as they experience it as a form of incomplete masculinity. Thus, I argue, it is important to unpack the interrelations between one’s vulnerability as the result of being exposed to border violence and spatial injustices and the (re) constructions of masculinity and its performance at the border. It is one’s real self that is evicted at the border, as it has numerous times before been evicted by the forces of racist and heteropatriarchal systems (Lorde, 1984). –But I saw the policeman laughing at me, he insisted. –The policeman is not laughing at you. But what they have made you believe is you, I remember wanting to tell him. –But then who are you laughing at? I know that you are also laughing at me. (Dialogue titled: “Why are you laughing at me” that I constructed from various conversations I had with Ege between 2016 and 2018 in Lesvos and Athens).

“It will not be the police that will decide if I will cross the border or not. It is my own choice to remain in Greece” is what Ege initially told me during the first weeks of spending time together on Lesvos. Ege, also, arrived late at the border at Idomeni in December 2015. And due to his Pakistani nationality, he was turned back by the police. Ege did not cross the border, depart from Greece and enter the ‘Balkan route’. Six years later, and while still in Greece, we will see how his narrative around choice and independency, shifts towards one of selfblaming, resentment and victimhood in relation to ‘being stuck in this stupid country’, as he ended up describing it. We will, also, see how I became implicated in this narrative. How I was blamed for the fact that he remained stuck in Greece. Since when did I become your enemy? I asked him.

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In order to hold my research accountable, to hold myself accountable, I try to remember what really happened at the border. But memories can also become borders. Bordered memories You cannot imagine how it felt to watch the police allowing some people to cross while blocking others. I reached the furthest point possible at the border, I could see Macedonia right in front of me, but they closed the borders right in front of my eyes. Hey, where do you think you are going, a police-man asked me and stopped me from moving forward. He did not even know I came from Pakistan, because by then I had lost my registration paper, that had expired anyway; from my appearance he judged that I was not Syrian, and of course I could not pretend to be because I don’t speak Arabic. And then we were evicted. (From Personal Conversation with Ege, March 2016, Lesvos)

The police were arresting on the pretext that migrants were causing trouble at the border, but, in fact, they were arresting all those migrants who were classified as economic migrants due to their perceived nationality. Thus, while those perceived as refugees, Syrians, Iraqis and to a lesser degree Afghanis, were pushed forward, economic migrants were immobilized on the Greek border islands and pushed back from the border at Idomeni. This process of pushing back, could not have happened without the support of the UNHCR, who, as Ege told me, “they lied to us that if we boarded their bus they would give us asylum, when in actual fact, as I understood once we arrived in Athens, they had set us up in a trap”. Indeed, according to Ege, only Pakistanis and North-Africans were forced to board the UNHCR buses. And once they arrived in Athens, contrary to what the UNHCR had promised, they were not given the chance to apply for asylum. Instead, they were transferred to the Taykvodo stadium from where a few days later, they were transferred to pre-removal/detention centres. The reason that the police gave for their arrest was that they had committed a criminal offense. Specifically, for moving to and remaining in locations where they did not have the right to be: the Idomeni border and the capital city of Athens, even if it was the UNHCR that transported them to Athens, as Ege’s above narrative indicates. Ege’s uneven geographies of mobility speak of multiple evictions from specific locations in Greece, such as Idomeni and Athens. Specifically, his

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experience at Idomeni brings us to Huub van Baar’s concept of ‘evictability’. Van Baar introduces the notion of ‘evictability’ in order to inquire into the “de-nationalization” and, in his words, “discuss the case study of Europe’s Romani minority to show how contemporary forms of securitization further divide Europe bio-politically along intra-European lines” (2017, abstract). Here, I use his notion of ‘evictability’ to reflect on migrants’ experiences of ‘borderland-Greece’ (Balibar 2009) such as that of Ege’s at Idomeni. We only need to think of the evictions that people experienced from Idomeni, Pireaus port and Taykvodo stadium in Athens and from the various squats in Athens and in Thessaloniki. “Evictability”, moreover, is not experienced evenly by all those people who are racialized as migrants. Arriving at Idomeni, Ege found himself, indeed, at the border within ‘evictability’, in the sense that, back then, Idomeni functioned as a border through migrants’ very evictability since not everyone at the same time and to the same degree was susceptible to evictability. Depending on one’s nationality or perceived nationality, some groups of people were allowed to cross the border and enter the Balkan route, some were allowed to remain in informal camps at Idomeni, and some were forcefully transported to Athens and from there to pre-removal detention centres. The ‘hotspot puzzle’ was formed as following: Afghanis, the ‘semirefugees’ (perceived not quite as refugees as the Syrians but neither entirely as economic migrants as the Pakistanis, for example) were taken to the Eliniko camp at the old Athenian airport, while, others, mainly NorthAfricans and Pakistanis were detained in pre-removal centres where they received deportation orders. There is even a border that runs through the procedure of eviction and the condition of evictability, in the sense that, it matters when forced removal and transfer is acknowledged or remembered as an eviction and when not and for whom and by whom not. The unofficial camp at Idomeni is known by activists and solidarians to have been evicted in June 2016. However, Ege and other Pakistanis that I spoke to refer to December 2015 as the time when Idomeni was evicted. It was in early June of 2016 when I accompanied Ege to a lawyer’s office in the neighbourhood of Exarchia. When the lawyer asked him why he had not applied for asylum as soon as he arrived in Lesvos, he told her that from Lesvos he went to Idomeni because that is where everyone was going but when he got there, he found out that the border was open only to Syrians, Iraqis and Afghanis; “and then Idomeni was evicted”. The lawyer corrected him by saying that “what you just referred to was not

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an eviction, you mean the occasion when some people that were causing trouble were arrested”. The above disagreement on how to name or describe what was happening at Idomeni during that time is revealing of the unevenness of evictability and the uneven geographies of remembering that it produces. Evicted bodies struggle to remember, as their very memories become evicted even by those who were there and who took part in their refusal to leave the border Idomeni but who remember things differently. Or to put it differently, they have the privilege to forget. –I remember things differently. –You don’t remember them differently; you have forgotten them. –Why are you rejecting what I remember? Why does your memory count more than mine? (Dialogue titled “The right to forget” from a conversation between me and Ege in October 2018 in Athens).

Undertaking the rather painful task of going through the pages of my PhD dissertation in order to turn it into this monograph, I discern the traces of peoples’ experiences that I myself have erased through the research process by shaping my research according to dates and events that have been produced by those whose memories count and/or who have the right to forget. How to write about people whose bodies have been evicted from spaces without evicting their feelings and emotions within research that wants to qualify as ‘participatory’, ‘in-depth’ and ‘multi-sited’ ethnography’ (Andersson 2014)? How to research from the location of evictability and then write about people who have been evicted from that (very) location? How to research with and write about the people when they are missing (Thoburn 2016). And how to reconnect with their stories, when our memories have been bordered (Horsti 2019). At the beginning of May 2016, I travelled with Ege to Idomeni, along with a film crew from China who was filming Ege in order to make a documentary of his arrival and time in Greece. Ege was returning to a location from where a few months ago, he had been evicted. I remember Ege mapping out to me all the important sites of his time at Idomeni. “That is where the clashes took place with the police, this is where the tea tent was, there is where my tent was, this is where we were distributing tea, that is the line that I could not cross, this is where we got evicted”.

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All these points were carved in Ege’s mind as mental geographies, while, simultaneously, he was embodying his memories of the closing borders and the feelings they imposed on him; how he felt back then and how he was feeling during our visit to Idomeni. While Ege was remembering, I attempted to take hold of his memories in order to bend and shape them into my own analytical framework, in order to relive them as mine. I was not there during the protests at Idomeni, neither during its many evictions. Thus, through Ege’s memories and our visit to that very same location, I struggled to compensate for my own absence during such an important time. I had, also, not made it in time to the border. Moreover, together with the crew from China, we kept our eye on Ege as we did not want him to wonder off on his own at Idomeni. We were scared that he could be arrested again, even if by this time, he had an asylum applicant’s card. Ege was getting annoyed with us and reacted against our insistence to keep an eye on him. He told us that he didn’t want to be taken care of and that he is not a child: “Back in November, I was fighting alongside the other activists and volunteers against the police. Do you think I am scared now; do you think I need you to watch out?”, he told us. Upon hearing those words, I remember feeling a prickle in my heart. I felt saddened that it was not me who had shared these moments with him but with other volunteers and activists. I was dominated by a feeling of incompleteness, of not having experienced important moments, enough moments at the border; my research felt incomplete. It bothered me that I (myself) hadn’t arrived at the border in time. And, looking back during the time of this writing, I can say, that it was then during our visit to Idomeni I decided that in order not to miss out again, I would never abandon Ege, that I would always follow him; that his route would become mine. Was it, also, then, that I began to reflect on questions of ethics regarding my research? Once again, I ask: Who is the migrant and who is the occupier? Am I a migrant or an occupier? When you yourself start to perform the hotspot and embody its violence, the answer lies in whether you are abandoning someone or letting them go. And whether you are abandoning someone or letting them go becomes and ethical and political question.

By the time we visited Idomeni in May 2016, the border had closed for all nationalities, leaving hundreds of people stranded at this border-site. People were refusing to depart from the border with the hope that it

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would reopen. One month later, however, they would be forced to leave Idomeni and their self-organized camps and be transferred to the newly opening official governmental camps run by the military. I am referring to the official date of Idomeni’s eviction. The date based on which the lawyer undermined Ege’s memory of what took place during his time there. Thus, along with the uneven geographies of the hotspot regime, we can, also, speak of the ways in which the border cuts through our very memories, and how it shapes uneven geographies in relation to the memories of specific events and dates regarding the hotspot’s trajectories. Official narratives of violence are being contradicted by people’s own memories of what took place at the border, as their very bodies become sites of the hotspot’s gradual formation and implementation. Thus, I ask: When our bodies become border-sites how do we avoid turning against our own body and the bodies of others around us?

Conclusion Is remembering or forgetting a matter of choice? For whom is it a choice and for whom it is not? How do we choose to remember places and people? Who has the right to remember and who has the right to forget? These are questions that gain significant importance in this book. As I write its chapters, I engage in a similar ‘remapping’ to the one that Ege performed at the border at Idomeni in May 2016. I revisit places that had been emblematic sites during the ‘refugee crisis’, such as scenes of arrival, the Olive Grove outside Moria hotspot on Lesvos, the Nisos Mykonos ferry, that made the journey between the border islands and the mainland Piraeus port in Athens, Viktoria square in Athens, buildings that were squatted and turned into housing projects for refugees in the neighbourhood of Exarchia and were then evicted. But, also, places that were and continue to be important emotional sites for me, even if they had not turned into symbolic places of the ‘crisis’, places that are located at the obscene of the ‘crisis’: Amerikis Square (footnote needed here), Strefi hill behind Exarchia, a basement flat, but, also, sounds, songs, smells and flavours, like the smell of mint tea, the taste of biryani, the smell of a humid flat and the smell of weed. For those who are forced to never forget, what might it mean to refuse to remember or to refuse to remember what those in power ask from you to remember? I remember June who had applied for asylum at Moria hotspot in 2017, once telling me that “I am forced to never forget, I

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must always remember if I want to survive here”. And, indeed, he had to remember everything in order to navigate his way through a system that is structured to make one want to forget. During his asylum interview, he had to remember all the events that forced him to apply for asylum in Greece; specific dates and times and names of people; the date of his asylum interview, even if it was scheduled in two years-time; the various deadlines for renewing his asylum card or for appealing against a negative decision; but, also, at what time he is allowed to exit the camp and at what time he must return; what time the food distribution takes place; the deadline for exiting the cash assistance program. He had to remember that he must leave Greece, that he must return to him ‘home-country’, that he even had a ‘home’ to return to and where that ‘home’ is; he had to remember… In relation to the years 2015–2020, what do I choose to remember and what to forget? I thought that we shared common memories with Ege by the mere fact that we lived through the ‘crisis’ together. Talking to him at a later stage, I realized that this was not the case. We don’t remember the same things and share a common memory of how the events unfolded. We don’t remember the same places, sounds, smells and words, or when we do, we remember them differently and they provoke different feelings and emotions. I am gradually forgetting. He still remembers… How can you relate to someone who doesn’t share the same memories of the time that you spent together? my sister had asked me one evening in December 2018, in a bar in the Athenian neighbourhood of Petralona. What I need to now accept in horror is the fact that the border had already separated us through our very first memories. –Then you must refuse what you have been made to forget. So, I started to rewrite my PhD dissertation. I began to write a book. I chose not to forget you … This book is about how I remember you. Silence -So, it is not about me… It is about you…, he told me once. (From my own reflections on a conversation that I had with Ege in 2020, Athens, titled: On “auto-ethnography”)

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References Ahmed, S. (2006). Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press. Andersson, Ruben. (2014). Illegality Inc. Clandestine Migration and the Business of Bordering Europe. Oakland: University of California Press. Avgeri, D. (2016). Reflections on Temporality as a Technique of Governing Migration: Authoritarian and Liberal Variations from Greece’s Recent Past, Presented at King’s College Workshop: “Questioning the Cartographies and Temporalities of Migration”. London. Balibar, E. (2009). Europe as Borderland. Environment and Planning D: Society and space, 27(2): 190–215. De Genova, N. (2018). The “Migrant Crisis” as Racial Crisis: Do Black Lives Matter in Europe?. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 41(10): 1765–1782. Fanon, F. (1967). Black Skin, White Masks. New York, NY: Grove Press. Heney, V. (2020). Unending and Uncertain: Thinking Through a Phenomenological Consideration of Self-Harm Towards a Feminist Understanding of Embodied Agency. Journal of International Women’s Studies, 21(3): 7–21. Horsti, K., ed. (2019). The Politics of Public Memories of Forced Migration and Bordering in Europe. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Lorde, A. (1984). Sister Outsider. Berkeley. Mbembe, Achille. (2003). Necropolitics. Public Culture, 15(1): 11–40. Meier, I. (2020). Affective Border Violence: Mapping Everyday Asylum Precarities Across Different Spaces and Temporalities. Emotion, Space and Society, 37: 100702. Newhouse, L.S. (2021). On Not Seeking Asylum: Migrant Masculinities and the Politics of Refusal. Geoforum, 120: 176–185. Tazzioli, Martina. (2017). The Government of Migrant Mobs: Temporary Divisible Multiplicities in Border Zones. European Journal of Social Theory. Tazzioli, M. (2018). The Temporal Borders of Asylum. Temporality of Control in the EU Border Regime. Political Geography, 64: 13–22. Thoburn, N. (2016). The People Are Missing: Cramped Space, Social Relations, and the Mediators of Politics. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 29(4): 367–381. Van Baar, H. (2017). Evictability and the Biopolitical Bordering of Europe. Antipode, 49(1): 212–230. Walia, H. (2014). Undoing Border Imperialism, 6. Ak Press.

CHAPTER 4

Entering the Hotspot

On a journey that I made on the 6th of March 2016 from Lesvos to Samos by ferry (a ferry that stopped and boarded passengers from the islands of Lesvos, Chios and Samos with the final destination of Athens), I encountered many people on the move and humanitarian organizations that were assisting them. Above me on the upper deck a No Borders activist group holds a large banner with the “No Borders” slogan inscribed on it, while journalists hold their cameras and equipment protectively, ready for action on the field. On the ferry, those migrants who had enough resources to book a cabin were allowed to move freely throughout the whole space of the ship as opposed to those who did not; the ferry personnel made sure that the latter stayed put within the boundaries of the lower deck, a space reserved only for them, where they could sleep only on chairs and on the floor. Police officers come and go and sometimes check the papers of migrants who, to them, did not appear to have the right to the ferry. This journey took place just before the EU–Turkey Deal was signed. A particular event on the ferry caught my attention. As police officers were coming and going one of them checked the papers of a migrant who in their words “does not look like a refugee but more like a Pakistani”. “I guess it is because I have darker skin, that the police-man checked me”, the young person who was, indeed, from Pakistan commented to © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Spathopoulou, Bordering and Governmentality Around the Greek Islands, Mobility & Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08589-5_4

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me. “But I showed him my papers and the police said that it is ok, I can continue my journey, it is ok for me to be here”, he told me. This traveller was not perceived to belong to the category of the “deserving refugee” but he was holding the right document that gave him (at least in early March) the right to the ferry—however, as the police officer commented to me later on, to “nothing more than this”. “Pakistanis will not be granted the right to stay in Greece nor be allowed to continue to Europe legally” (Conversation with police officer on March 9, 2016, on ferry from Lesvos to Samos).1 This event shows how the hotspot operates upon the migrant’s very body, as was the case of the Pakistani migrant who was checked by a police officer on the ferry because he did not look like a ‘refugee’, but a Pakistani, in other words, an ‘economic migrant’. The hotspots as infrastructures/spatializations of European migration management become inscribed in gendered-racialized ways on people’s bodies. Racial profiling like the massive sweeps and stop and check policies conducted by police on the streets in the cities, play a crucial role in who becomes the target ‘on the road’, that is, en route from one border to the other, from Lesvos to Idomeni, on ferries and other means of transportation. When I arrived on Lesvos at the beginning of March 2016, I observed a change in the attitude of the ‘locals’ on the island, specifically, a shift from the ‘refugees welcome’ frenzy and spectacular scenes of arrival of the previous months to a frustration at what they saw as their islands being turned into prisons for all the “bad migrants, such as the Pakistanis, Moroccans and Algerians”. According to many of the locals that I spoke to, Germany and other wealthy northern European countries were taking all the “good refugees”, the “wealthy and educated Syrians”, the “refugee-families”. These comments speak of the (gradual) prisonification of the islands and the changing situation in which islanders ceased to encounter a ‘flow’ that was passing through the islands and moving forward but what they perceived to be illegal economic migrants that were not allowed to leave the islands.

1 This ethnographic account was first published in Spathopoulou, A., & Carastathis, A. (2020). Hotspots of resistance in a bordered reality. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 38(6): 1067–1083. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775820906167.

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One of the first relevant exceptions to the inside–outside circulation through the hotspots prior to the date of the EU–Turkey Deal was made by a huge group of Pakistani migrants—about 200 people—who at the end of February 2016 refused to be fingerprinted, remaining blocked on the island (see also Tazzioli 2016). It is the refusal of this Pakistani group to enter the hotspot and to comply with the ‘order of things’ (Foucault 2005) of the asylum procedure that I turn to in this chapter.

The ‘Pakistani Issue’ When I arrived on Lesvos to begin my fieldwork on the 27th of February 2016, the big “issue” that the hotspot authorities were dealing with is what (‘Greek’ and ‘European’) governmental actors and NGOs alike referred to as “the Pakistani issue”. Pakistanis were not allowed to register and leave the island by ferry, but they were refusing to apply for asylum inside the hotspot, because they knew what would follow. In their case, applying for asylum would lead to their immediate detention and eventual deportation. Since the 26th of February (the date that Pakistanis were not allowed to leave the island), Pakistanis sought refuge at the Olive Grove right outside the hotspot registration centre. At the time of my arrival, around 200 Pakistanis were seeking refuge at the Olive Grove and refusing to enter the hotspot, and “surrender to the UNHCR”, as a Pakistani migrant told me. It was during this time, that I first came across with Ege in his yellow jacket who was acting as an intermediary between the Greek authorities and international organizations and the Pakistani group that had sought refuge at the Olive Grove. He stood out, and, therefore, caught my attention, as the hotspot shed its gaze upon him. Upon my arrival at the Olive Grove, I encountered him at the entrance of the hotspot. Did I have any other option than to approach him through the hotspot? (notes from my diary on the 15th of March 2016).

The Pakistanis’ insistence to remain at the Olive Grove was of great concern to the hotspot authorities who perceived it as a ‘problem’ since it was creating a disturbance to the newly established hotspot’s ‘order of things’. As one volunteer from a grassroot organization that was active on the Olive Grove told me “Their refusal is taking place outside the hotspot, under the sight of the EU” (Personal Conversation with Olive Grove

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volunteer, early March 2016, Lesvos). Indeed, the hotspot’s authorities had declared a small ‘state of emergency’ at the hotspot on Lesvos, within the larger state of emergency that the so-called “refugee crisis” had provoked on the islands (and in Greece in general). This smaller ‘crisis’ within the larger ‘crisis’ on Lesvos had to be resolved as soon as possible, according to a UNHCR personnel that I spoke to during these days and who pointed out that “it is in the interest of everyone, including the Pakistanis that they enter the hotspot”. The Pakistani migrants’ presence at the Olive Grove had become a subject of concern, also, for the grassroot organization ‘Olive Grove’. In December 2015, a small, grassroots organization rented land planted with olive trees right outside the official operating hotspot at Moria from a local farmer to provide shelter in tents, food, clothing, medical treatment and information to migrants transiting through the island. As some of the volunteers, remarked to me during the first week of March 2016 at the Olive Grove, we are not happy with this development because we realize that from a space of transit, we have become a space of detention for Pakistanis. And we would never want to function as a detention site.

Since the organization had become active at the Olive Grove in November 2015, what back then was called the ‘Afghani hill’ because of the large numbers of Afghani migrants queuing at the registration office at Moria and residing in makeshift tents on the land as they awaited their registration number, an informal agreement had been made between the hotspot personnel and the volunteers of ‘Olive Grove’. The authorities inside the hotspot were responsible for making sure that all migrants were being fingerprinted and registered, while the volunteer group would accommodate the basic needs of the newcomers until they were able to board the ferry for the mainland. This informal agreement, therefore, functioned as a ‘spatial contract’ (Vradis, 2011), solving the ‘spatial crisis’ that was being produced by large numbers of people queuing outside the registration centre. The ‘spatial contract’, moreover, delineated the border between what constituted the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ of the hotspot, and, as such was experienced by the migrants and volunteers as they moved in between these two spaces. As one volunteer from ‘Olive Grove’ told me;

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the fact is that Moria needs us because of it being overcrowded and not having enough space and facilities, containers, tents for all refugees to remain inside, we are supporting them in a way by providing a space of emergency accommodation and catering to all those refugees who cannot find a place within the hotspot or who do not want to remain inside the hotspot. Because the truth is that all the refugees prefer to come and spend time at the Olive Grove. The atmosphere is much happier and human. And even the big organizations, like Oxfam, who are operating inside the hotspot, have asked for our help, when they need, for example, extra tents or some information about certain nationalities. There is an exchange of information between us and them, between the Olive Grove and the hotspot in order to manage better this crisis. And of course, we cannot function independently from the hotspot because that is where all refugees receive their registration number without which they cannot do anything. And, also, we cannot do anything to help them if they are not registered first. That is why, we tell all refugees that come to us that first they must register inside before receiving any of our services. Otherwise, we would have issues with the authorities inside the hotspot.” (Interview with OG volunteer, 3rd of March 2016, Lesvos)

From the above volunteer’s account, we understand that there were, also, connections between the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of the hotspot, as there was an exchange of information between them and the newcomers moving in between the two spaces. Each space, moreover, had its own role in the emerging situation of the ‘humanitarian crisis’ that was declared on the island. As an employee working for Oxfam inside Moria hotspot told me: we are responsible that everything is happening in a legal way for the refugees, we provide them with all the information they need about their legal situation and how to move forward from now on, we do all the serious and hard work, while, the camp at the Olive Grove makes sure that the refugees can have a relaxing and fun time, they can rest and have some moments of socializing and activities, which of course is also important. We both need each other. (Interview with Oxfam personnel, 4th of March 2016, Lesvos)

But something had changed with the presence of the Pakistani migrants at the Olive Grove. The Pakistanis had not entered the hotspot to give their fingerprints; they were, in other words, rendered ‘illegal’. Whereas until now the ‘Olive Grove’ was assisting registered and migrants, the fact that the Pakistani group was refusing to go ‘inside’ and remained on the grounds of the Olive Grove, the (informal) agreement between the authorities and the volunteers from ‘Olive Grove’ had been broken

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and the spatio-temporal ‘order of things’ had been disrupted. As we have mentioned in previous work, “all actors that form part of the border spectacle (De Genova 2013) felt perplexed: the spectacle was being interrupted, not only by a protest or riot but by a refusal of the very logic of the border, the temporal and spatial categories that it produces, and their naturalised application to particular nationalized groups” (Spathopoulou and Carastathis 2020, p. 12). The Olive Grove gradually was becoming a site of refusal, a ‘hotspot of resistance’, as migrants were refusing to give their fingerprints. And the volunteers at the Olive Grove were becoming part of the Pakistanis’ collective refusal. One other volunteer, moreover, interpreted the ‘Pakistani issue’ in the following way: when before we were operating as a transit camp, now, I feel we are slowly becoming a space of detention for all those migrants who are not able to board the ferry. But we never wanted to become a detention centre. We don’t want to become complicit in this ugly game that is developing here on this island. What the EU is doing to these guys is completely unfair. It is slowly turning Lesvos into a huge detention centre. Now our camp is hosting mainly Pakistanis. I have ambivalent feelings for these guys because they are not here because of war in their country but for economic reasons and, therefore, they are causing trouble to the real refugees, since the EU is trying to control all these people that are arriving at the borders, and, therefore, Syrians, Iraqis and Afghanis are also paying the price. And it is difficult to communicate with them since most of them are uneducated and come from the rural villages of Pakistan. They don’t speak English. Thank goodness we have Ege. (From Personal Conversations with OG volunteers, March 2016)

From the above, we see how OV was entering into a ‘crisis’, an existential crisis, in the sense, that they did not know how to react and how to ‘manage’ the Pakistani migrants. These dilemmas and the need for sudden and emerging decisions that on many occasions go against one’s ethical–political worldview and principles, are characteristic, I argue, of the ‘hotspot reality’ that started to take place on the island. As Markos from Iran, who had also begun to volunteer with OV as a Farsi translator, put it, “the refugee crisis is turning us into bad human beings. On this island, we are all turning against ourselves, our values and beliefs.” (Personal Conversation with Markos, early March 2016, Olive Grove, Lesvos) While the volunteers at the Olive Grove were supporting the Pakistani migrants, they felt that they were simultaneously doing the hotspot’s ‘dirty work’ by keeping the migrants trapped at the Olive Grove. Things

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had become complicated, and the organization would have to make a choice; they would either have to convince the Pakistanis to enter the hotspot or to continue to support them but risking that they would be, eventually, evicted by the authorities and convicted for providing assistance to ‘illegal migrants’. Indeed, as the hotspot on Lesvos became operative, in numerous cases ‘non-registered’—as they were named— volunteers (and concerned civilians) were arrested and charged with human trafficking and for participating in illegal activities. The Pakistanis were trapped on the island and the volunteers trapped within the emerging ‘hotspot reality’. The Pakistani group causes a ‘disturbance’, or even a discomfort, to the various actors present at the hotspot, both inside and outside the hotspot. As a volunteer from OV put it, she had “mixed feelings for these guys because they were not running away from war, their life was not in danger but had come to Europe for economic reasons”. Thus, many volunteers saw them as causing problems to other ‘real refugees’, such as the Syrians refugees, who were escaping war and who had come to Europe to save the lives of their “women and children”. Thus, the Pakistanis at the Olive Grove were being perceived by many of the actors active on the ground that I spoke to during this time, as bodies that ‘don’t matter’ (Butler 2011), or matter less, than the bodies of the ‘real refugees’. Their bodily presence was being narrated along racialized, gendered and class lines. I encountered many volunteers who had come to help in the crisis on Lesvos and who felt perplexed, as they put it, with the presence of the Pakistani group, who “were single men, did not speak English, and were really poor”. Their physical presence challenged the refugee crisis’s hegemonically constructed ‘scene of arrival’ of the educated and middleclass ‘Syrian family’ on the Greek shores. Several people were feeling a discomfort at what I argue constituted the obscene of the ‘crisis’. They wanted to remain at the scene with its familiar script and where the various roles were clearly distributed. And so, did I. Pakistani migrants who were immobilized at the border, through their immobilization, I argue, were seen as blocking (‘real’) refugees’ mobility, since their presence at the border formulated the pretext for the EU to close its borders to all arriving nationalities. The fact that the evolution of the criminalization of the ‘economic migrant’ was resulting in the criminalization of the ‘refugee’ was becoming evident on Lesvos. The arrival of large numbers of so-called economic migrants and fake refugees (terrorists posing the refugees), was being constructed as the main reason for

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tightening the EU’s borders and introducing the hotspot approach, an approach that targets, as we have seen, the so-called ‘mixed flows’. On the other hand, the Pakistani group’s refusal to enter the hotspot and have their fingerprints taken had become a source of stress for the Greek authorities who feared the EU’s controlling gaze upon Greece and its ‘migration management’. What would EU officials say if they realized that migrants were not being registered at the EU border?2 Like the years of Greece’s financial crisis, once again, Greece would be blamed for not doing its job properly; for not separating the ‘flow’. Greece had to prove it was in control in order to guarantee its position within the Schengen Zone.

“We Are not Refugees; We Are Economic Migrants!” In my previous work together with Anna Carastathis (2020), we showed how the majority of Pakistani migrants arriving on Samos island in September 2016 were rejecting the asylum process. Specifically, they were telling UNHCR staff openly that they were not running away from war in Pakistan but coming to Europe to find work, in order to earn money to send back to their families. As the banners, they held during a demonstration outside the hotspot read, ‘We are not refugees, we are economic migrants’ (p. 11). We saw how they claimed, “from the outset, that one is an economic migrant by refusing to entertain the spectacle of a just process of distributing asylum. Further, we discussed how “this strategy refuses the conditionality of mobility on legality, circumventing the authority of the border by inhabiting the category of the ‘illegal migrant’” (p. 12). Building on work that explores the intersection between masculinity and mobility, Leonie Newhouse shows how gendered ideologies shape not just the decision to embark on a new migration project, but also inform how migrants evaluate the legal status-destination dyad as they plot their futures. Specifically, she shows, how “such refusals were narrated through a grammar of masculinity, as agentive choices to move towards autonomy, responsibility and away from dependency, even as 2 See: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/25/greece-under-growing-pre ssure-to-stem-flow-of-refugees-and-migrants-into-eu and https://www.ekathimerini.com/ news/205383/greece-threatened-with-expulsion-from-schengen-over-migration-crisis/.

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they were animated by structural constraints imposed by waning geopolitical commitments to refugee rights globally and shrinking opportunities for (and restrictions on) foreigners in East African economies” (2021, abstract). In relation to Newhouse’s discussion, I would like to reflect on the interrelations between Pakistani migrants’ refusal of the categorical recognition of the asylum seeker offered to them at the hotspot and constructions of masculinities. Let us return to the Olive at Moria hotspot at the beginning of March 2016 and to the group of Pakistanis who were refusing to enter the hotspot and apply for asylum. Kasper a migrant from Lahore in Pakistan told me the following, on the day of a protest that took place at the Olive Grove on the 12th of March 2016: if Europe is causing the problem, please let Europe know that I don’t want to go to Europe, I have no money left to go even if I wanted to; I want and need to work in Greece. Greece wants to give me a job, why is Europe stopping this? “What is all the fuss about asylum.

What Kasper, in other words, was interested in was not to receive international protection and humanitarian assistance in Europe but the right to move on and start working in Crete. The island on which there was a job waiting for him, where his brother’s friends, the Pakistanis who had invited him in the first place to come, were working. And like the Pakistani migrants who held a protest on Samos, he was open about the fact that he did not want to apply for asylum and hence refused to enter the hotspot, even if this refusal meant his criminalization on the spot. Kasper instrumentally sought to be given the deportation order without having first to apply for asylum and await the decision inside the hotspot. He wanted to continue from Lesvos his clandestine journey, as Pakistanis who arrived prior to the implementation of the hotspot were able to do. “when applying for asylum was a matter of choice”, as another person from the Pakistani group at the Olive group told me. I don’t need to be taken care of; I don’t need the UNHCR neither any other NGO. I appreciate what the volunteers are doing for us, but I am not here to waste my time. I was told that prior to the time when Syrian started to arrive in Greece, Pakistani migrants after a few days were allowed to leave

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the islands and find work at different farms in Greece {…} Look, I came all this way from Pakistan, I have crossed so many borders and survived so many things on my way here, don’t you think that I am fit enough to work? {…} My brother who has been in Greece for years, has suddenly become seriously ill and cannot work anymore. He has asked now for asylum in Greece. I came in order to take his place, but I would have come anyway to Europe, since I am a fit man (From Personal Conversations with Kasper and other Pakistani migrants in early March 2016, Olive Grove, Lesvos).

In Kasper’s above words, we discern how he views the ‘refugee crisis’ and the arrival of the Syrian refugees at Lesvos’s hotspot, as a ‘huge fuss’ that impedes him from moving on and completing his plan to work in Crete. According to Kasper, he has a job waiting for him; thus, he does not need the support of any NGO or the UNHCR. Linking Kasper’s reaction to my discussion on how the Pakistanis were being perceived as an obstacle to the ‘real’ refugees’ mobility in/to Europe, we see how the hotspot functions upon the separation of the ‘migrant mob’ into different categories, also, by turning people against each other through competing and fixed subjectivities, as they demand their right to the ferry (Spathopoulou 2016). At the same time, we see how Kasper draws upon certain assumptions around masculinity and ableism, by turning to his body as a proof that he is a “man enough” to work. Specifically, he constructs himself as an autonomous man who is able to provide for himself—he rejects, in other words, the figure of the refugee who is perceived as being passive and dependent on someone else’s compassion or protection. One of the last things he told me was that he would have anyway migrated to Europe (even if his brother had not been sick) because he is a ‘fit man’ and hence able to migrate to and work in Europe. In Kasper’s imaginary, asking for asylum, as his brother ended up doing because of his sickness was tied to a certain bodily weakness, a physical inferiority. And now, on Lesvos the hotspot’s authorities were forcing him to do the same, whereas “look at me, I am fit enough to work. I don’t need asylum”. Thus, we can argue that the hotspot forces one to turn to their own body and engage in various gendered representations and performances in order to enact their right to the ferry. And, in the case of the above group of Pakistani migrants, not by performing ‘vulnerability’ or ‘refugeeness’, but by performing masculinity as capable economic migrants, along the lines of “yes, we are economic migrants”.

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“While it seemed impossible” during the months leading up to the EU–Turkey Deal “for Pakistani migrants along with many other nationalities to leave the islands for the mainland ‘legally’, like the ‘illegal’ routes that migrants are forced to take across national borders when all ‘legal’ routes are closed to them, once more, ‘illegal’ ways are explored and used to cross the internal border separating the islands from the mainland, creating in this way, another industry of ‘illegality’ (Andersson 2014) which is profiting from the prisonification of the islands through the hotspot regime. As we have pointed out elsewhere, “while the hotspot approach and the EU–Turkey Deal claims to seek to combat the “smuggling of migrants”, it arguably proliferates clandestine routes, displacing them from the exterior to the interior of the national border, or, rather, displacing or multiplying the border itself” (Spathopoulou and Carastathis 2020, p. 8), a border which materializes, also, through the performance of certain fixed subjectivities, such as that of the ‘economic migrant’ versus the ‘refugee’ and gendered binaries, that of the ‘man’ versus the ‘woman’.

The EU–Turkey Deal: Entering the Hotspot –In order to reach out to him, I had to enter the hotspot. –What would have happened, if you had refused to enter? –Perhaps, then, we would have never met… –But you chose to enter… in order for your fieldwork to begin. Was it really a matter of choice? (A dialogue titled: “No, I did not enter the hotspot” that I developed with myself many times during my fieldwork and writing my PhD dissertation. Inspired by the Pakistanis refusal to enter the hotspot at the end of February-beginning of March 2016).

When the EU–Turkey Deal was signed on the 18th of March 2016 the police started to raid the spaces and camps in which mainly Pakistani migrants had found refuge from detention outside of the “hotspot”. On the 24th of March, Pakistani migrants collectively decided to turn themselves in and go inside Moria so that the police would not have to come to Olive Grove and arrest them and, thus, cause trouble to the volunteers. The Pakistani migrants felt that they had no other option than to enter the hotspot and take part in the procedure that its system imposes:

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detention and asylum application, in other words, asylum through detention, what has now become the normalized procedure in Greece. They understood that they would never be granted the right to the ferry. The previous day the director of the hotspot had visited the Pakistani migrants at the Olive Grove and told them that the border had always been closed for them and that they are not wanted in Europe. Moreover, she clarified that this was neither her decision nor that of the Greek government but the EU’s. And that if they did not enter the hotspot, FRONTEX would take them in by force. At this point, the options that the hotspot director was giving them were either to “voluntarily return” (that is, be deported) or to enter the hotspot, apply for asylum and be detained until their claim had been processed. After a few meetings that the Pakistani group held at the Olive Grove, the Pakistani community leaders told the volunteers that all Pakistanis had decided to go inside ‘voluntary’ because they did not want to cause any issues to the volunteers who had supported them all this time by allowing them to remain at the Olive Grove. Moreover, they did not want to be humiliated and taken inside by force. The UNHCR ensured them that they would be able to apply for asylum and that until a decision was made on each one of them individually, they would not be deported to Turkey. Thus, on the 24th of March, the Pakistanis collectively entered ‘inside’ the hotspot at Moria. The director of the Moria hotspot praised them for their ‘act of obedience’ and that they had finally taken the correct decision and “that in the end, they understood that we all must comply with what the EU says” (Personal Conversation with hotspot’s director, 24 March 2016, Moria hotspot, Lesvos).3

3 The above statement reflects the idea that the Greek government of SYRIZA was being forced to comply with the financial demands/requirements of the EU in order to remain in the Eurozone and put forward a specific ‘migration management’ in order to guarantee their position in the Schengen Zone. We need to remember here that Sunday 5th July saw thousands celebrate as many people voted to reject the austerity demanded by the Troika as a condition of remaining in the Eurozone. However, one week later, Sunday 12th, and that position was reversed as PM Tsipras agreed to a set of demands even worse than those rejected in the referendum. Similarly, prior to receiving her position on Lesvos by the ministry of migration (October 2015), the director of the Moria hotspot was known for her engagement as an activist in migrant struggles. However, by March 2016 she was demanding from the Pakistani migrants to succumb, basically, to their own detention, because, in her own words, “this is what our own government is forced to do, to obey the rules of the EU, it is not my decision, nor my government’s desire”. This

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As we have discussed with Anna Carastathis, “soon as the EU–Turkey Deal was implemented (March 20, 2016) everyone who was already in the hotspot and who had arrived prior to the deal, was forcefully removed from the hotspot. Those who applied for asylum were ferried to various military-controlled camps on the mainland for their asylum cases to be processed there. Many of those who were deemed ineligible for asylum, including Pakistani nationals, were either locked in Section B of the hotspot to await their deportation, or were transported to the mainland and interred in what are known as ‘pre-removal’ or, literally, ‘pre-departure’ centres, such as those in Korinthos and Amygdaleza, also to be eventually deported. The reason for this was to create space on the islands for all those people who were anticipated to arrive after March 20th, since the new arrivals would not be allowed to exit the hotspots until the finalisation of their asylum process” (Spathopoulou and Carastathis, pp. 10–11). During the time of this writing, exactly six years have passed since the above events took place. Back then, we wondered how worse can things get? And it is horrifying to realize that they can get worse and that they did, much worse. From the location of the present, your mind plays games by asking whether things could have turned out differently.

Conclusion At the end of February 2016, the evening that I took the ferry from Piraeus port in Athens to Lesvos where I would begin fieldwork, my parents and a very good friend of mine from Kurdistan took me to the port and escorted me to ferry. Upon embarking on the ferry and as I was saying goodbye to them, my Kurdish friend’s last words to me as I was making my way up to the ferry’s deck were: “Wow, you look like a real anthropologist who is on her way to the field!”. His words disturbed me and stuck to me during the journey by ferry. On many occasions, his words would return to me, almost like a warning and in, turn, I would shuffle them away by refusing to accept them: No, I am not an anthropologist, I am not a researcher, or at least not just a researcher; I am so much more than this and research constitutes a small part of what I am doing on the islands. is yet another example of the existing “nexus between migration management and the politics of austerity” (Carastathis 2018: 145).

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However, my friend’s words as I was embarking on the ferry to Lesvos, did compel me to reflect on the following questions: What is my right to the ferry? And how does my right to the ferry connect to my right to (do) research on Lesvos? The ferry forms an important site of my arrival/entry into the ‘field’ and my exit/departure out from the ‘field’; itself becoming a site that breaks down the very boundaries between the “outside” and the “inside” of the field. That is to say, the movement of the ferry, beyond and across, as well as within a bounded territory serves to reproduce the territory that is being bounded (Steinberg 2009). The same can be argued for my research, that is, my movement of the ferry, beyond and across, as well as within the bounded territory of the ‘field’, serves to reproduce the ‘field’ that is being bounded. Does research have the potential to break down the boundaries of the ‘field’? I travelled from Athens to Lesvos by ferry at the end of February 2016. I stayed for about a week on Lesvos and then took a ferry for Samos. I returned to Lesvos, again by ferry, on the 20th of March 2016, the first day of the implementation of the EU–Turkey Deal. My own trajectory on the ferry draws upon the prior to and the after of the EU–Turkey Deal, what Martina Tazzioli refers as a “split temporality, formed by a “before” and an “after”, as migrants’ eligibility for the relocation and for the preregistration procedure have been subjected to proper temporal borders; namely, temporal borders are enacted in this case as time intervals into which migrants fit” (2018, p. 19). The ferry maps out a time interval into which migrants fit or don’t fit, which migrants have the right to the ferry, and which are denied this right. In this sense, my own research to and from the Greek border islands delineates this ‘split temporality’, the “before” and the “after”, as it captures a threshold, exactly, because, contrary to the arriving migrants on the islands who were denied the right to the ferry, my right to the ferry remained untouched at the aftermath of the Deal. Thus, I wonder: How might we think of research ethics beyond academic approvals and risk assessments and rather as a task to be completed and pushed aside once it has been approved, to approach it as an ongoing and incomplete process, a journey by ferry from which the researcher refuses to disembark even once the research has officially come to an end? I met him in the split temporality formed by a ‘before’ and ‘after’ the EUTurkey Deal.

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I met on Lesvos, at the borderlands between ‘Turkey’ and ‘Greece’, ‘East’ and ‘West’. Our first encounter took place a few days prior to the Deal; We re-united the day the Deal was implemented. We had been split into different times and spaces. How could we share the same memories? You, see we had both entered the hotspot… (Text from my diary titled “I entered the hotspot” that I wrote down on a ferry journey from Samos to Lesvos on 3rd of April 2016).

References Andersson, R. (2014). Illegality Inc. Clandestine Migration and the Business of Bordering Europe. Oakland: University of California Press. Butler, J. (2011). Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. Routledge. Carastathis, A. (2018). Nesting Crises. Women’s Studies International Forum, 68: 142–148. De Genova, Nicholas. (2013). Spectacles of Migrant ‘Illegality’: The Scene of Exclusion, the Obscene of Inclusion. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 36(7): 1180– 1198. Foucault, M. (2005). The Order of Things. Routledge. Newhouse, L.S. (2021). On Not Seeking Asylum: Migrant Masculinities and the Politics of Refusal. Geoforum, 120: 176–185. Spathopoulou, A. and Carastathis, A. (2020). Hotspots of Resistance in a Bordered Reality. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 38(6): 1067–1083. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775820906167. Spathopoulou, A. (2016). The Ferry as a Mobile Hotspot: Migrants at the Uneasy Borderlands of Greece. Society & Space, 8 November. Accessed at http://societyandspace.org/2016/12/15/the-ferry-as-a-mobile-hotspotmigrants-at-the-uneasy-borderlands-of-greece/, on 5 July 2017. Steinberg, P.E. (2009). Sovereignty, Territory, and the Mapping of Mobility: A View from the Outside. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 99(3): 467–495. Tazzioli, M. (2016). Greece’s Camps Europe’s Borders. Published in Oxford Bordercriminologies blog. https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/research-subject-gro ups/centrecriminology/centrebordercriminologies/blog/2016/10/greece’scamps. Tazzioli, M. (2018). The Temporal Borders of Asylum. Temporality of Control in the EU Border Regime. Political Geography, 64: 13–22. Vradis, A. (2011). Breaching the Spatial Contract: Democracy Under Construction. Athens: A/Sinechia Publications [in Greek], pp. 211–218.

CHAPTER 5

Refusing the Hotspot

The Sexualized Landscape of the ‘Refugee Crisis’ The hotspot’s violent separation and categorization of the ‘mixed-migrant flow’ into distinct categories according to degrees of deservingness and un-deservingness, I contend, structured peoples’ sexual desires and performances at the Olive Grove, as well as perceptions around which subjects deserve sexual attention and which do not. Depending from which geographical location one had arrived at the border, their gender position and ascribed nationality created certain expectations around one’s sexual performance outside the hotspot; how people ought to approach each other, who (which group of people) it is ok and normal to become close and intimate with and from whom you should turn away and keep a distance. That is, the way in which the hotspot fixes or holds bodies and subjects to certain routes, also, shapes, I argue, (sexual) practices and orientations towards certain bodies. Here Sarah Ahmed’s framework (2006) for considering “an experience in which subjects might actively participate in following a particular line of movement, while also simultaneously feeling a strong or distinct pull towards or away from it” (Ahmed in Heney 2020, p. 14) is useful. Thus, depending on how one was being viewed and categorized through the hotspot approach, one felt compelled to either hide or make visible and reinforce their (assumed) sexual identity. Fanon (1952), moreover, provides us with an © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Spathopoulou, Bordering and Governmentality Around the Greek Islands, Mobility & Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08589-5_5

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analysis of the effects and affects on desire under anti-Black racism, and how gendered notions of power, embodiment and selfhood are structured from the inside by the colonial practice of racism (Drabinski 2019).1 The socio-political landscape of the 2015–2016 “refugee crisis” (at least in Greece) was highly sexualized, something that, I believe, is not being discussed enough in (ethnographic) accounts of the ‘crisis’. And with the term sexualized, I am not referring to the erotic, the deep connection with self and others, and how I have discussed it in Chapter 1 along the lines of Audre Lorde. For my discussion on the interplay between the scene(s) and the obscene(s) of the ‘refugee crisis’ and how this interplay links to the construction and deconstruction of the ‘refugee/economic migrant’ binary, I find useful A.N. Ahmad who enquires into the Bataillean sense of “anarchic waste” and “base materialism”, which calls “attentiveness to things and people that are ‘horribly excluded’ through expulsion from the productive system” (2009, p. 318). Ahmad’s discussion is particularly relevant for understanding some of the less visible tensions and dynamics through which the ‘refugee-migrant binary’ shaped peoples’ sexual subjectivities at the Olive Grove on Lesvos. A.N. Ahmad argues that, a theoretically nuanced approach which resists rigid distinctions between sexuality and the economic sphere is required if we are to understand the dynamics of love, sex and romance in migrations that take place against a backdrop of global inequity and intensifying migration controls. (2009, p. 309)

In relation to the above, I once again turn to the Pakistanis’ struggle at the Olive Grove. As we have pointed out with Anna Carastathis, it is important to mention that ‘Pakistani’ functions as a derogatory synonym for the ‘illegal immigrant’ and are used widely to refer to all undocumented migrants in Greece. Indeed, an established and well-organized Pakistani community exists in Greece since at least the 1970s when migrants who first arrived as so-called guest workers during the time of the junta (1967–1974) came to work in construction projects that were flourishing during this period (Broesma and Lazarescu 2009). In the early 2000s, ‘Pakistani’ became normalized as a derogatory, generic 1 https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/frantz-fanon/. Accessed 25 July 2022.

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synonym for the ‘illegal immigrant’ used widely to refer to undocumented migrants in Greece. Since the introduction of the hotspot system, Pakistanis became constructed as ‘economic migrants’, a disposable (and deportable) labour force for the agricultural sector in Greece. The hotspots draw on this culturally available justifying discourse to naturalize the technocratic management of migration in the Aegean borderspace. Relegated to this category, Pakistani migrants, as I discussed in the previous chapter, strategically deployed this category to assert their right to stay in Greece—for decades reliant on their hyper-exploited labour (Spathopoulou and Carastathis 2020, p. 13). As Pakistanis arrived on Lesvos at the end of 2015 and the beginning of 2016, in a space “spliced with sexual encounters and the sampling of forbidden pleasures” (Ahmad 2009, p. 317), their categorization (and subsequently criminalization) as ‘economic migrants’, is not only experienced as a loss of one’s freedom of mobility through detention on the island and a deprivation of the ‘right to the ferry’. At the same time, the denial of their right to the ferry, I argue, is, also, experienced as a loss of sexual and emotional recognition that other migrant nationalities enjoy because their bodies through their representation in the ‘refugee crisis’ have not become the “locus of such an ‘intense’ (my emphasis) sexual and emotional deprivation” (2009, p. 321). The ‘deserving refugee’ as the protagonist of the ‘refugee crisis’, is not being associated with the labour process but with the spectacular scene of arrival on the shores of Lesvos. Pakistani migrants, on the other hand, through the labour process, are being transferred out of the ‘refugee crisis’ scene of arrival and pushed into the obscene, both literally, through various discriminatory policies, such as detention inside the hotspot and figuratively through what Ahmad refers to as “sexual de-materialisation”; that “there is the labour process itself, which is in many ways de-sexualizing. And according to Ahmad, “it functions by reproducing an ideology that denies immigrant men the status of gendered, sexual beings: class and race effectively intervene to prevent sexual materialisation” (2009, pp. 319–320). Indeed, the figure of the Syrian refugee tends to be equated with the role of husband and father and head of household, in other words, with the heteronormative family, etc. (Carastathis and Tsilimpounidi 2020)—in short, they are constructed as full human beings, not merely as labour and nothing but labour, as with the case of Pakistani migrants. It is important to point out here that Ahmad’s analysis involves ‘migrants’ that identify as ‘men’ and risks equating the status of gendered

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sexual beings with that of a full human being, without pointing out how gender (as race and class) forms part of that same ideology that robs from people the erotic within them, that “most profoundly creative source” (Lorde, 1984) within us. What I am interested to understand are the ways in which at the Olive Grove, people on the move sought refuge in the premises of gender by performing certain kinds of masculinities as a way of surviving and moving forward. How, moreover, gender shaped people’s experiences and understanding of what it means to move forward, remain put, settle down or return. Let us turn to another “figure of migration” (Nail 2015) the so-called ‘North-African migrant’ or the ‘Maghrebi’, as ‘he’ is often being referred to by the hotspot’s authorities and personnel, and who is, also, being classified as an ‘economic migrant’, and, thus, a deportable subject. However, contrary to the figure of the ‘Pakistani’, this figure is linked to an “overt recognition of migrant sexuality, that invariably takes the form of negative and pathological representations imbued in varying forms of deviancy— a phenomenon to be feared” (Ahmad 2009, p. 310). In other words, he is constructed as a potential rapist, a threat to Western (European) women, a potential criminal. On Lesvos, I encountered the widespread notion (being expressed by various actors active at the hotspot) that the Maghrebi do not come to Europe for work but for enjoyment, fun, drugs and sexual freedom/exploitation. It is not a coincidence, I argue, that in many instances during my fieldwork on the islands, but, also, in Athens, I heard Moroccans in particular being referred to as the “tourists”, a term, already, burdened with sexual, gendered and racial connotations. They are being constructed as the ‘tourist migrants’ who are not escaping war or financial devastation but have come to Europe for ‘tourism’, pushed by greed and the desire to enjoy European luxuries and freedom, such as sex, drugs, alcohol, ‘women’ and enjoyment. Thus, it is assumed that “even if the Moroccan is deported, it is not a big deal to him, since he enjoyed his trip to Europe and a free ticket back to his country” (is what Musin from Morocco told me that the police had said to him on Lesvos in May 2016). If the ‘Maghrebi’, the ‘Orientals’ are only seen as sexualized bodies then the ‘Pakistani’, the ‘Asian’ bodies count only as a form of subordinated labour. Linking my current discussion on the “de-sexualized” figure of the ‘Pakistani’ through the labour process, to Ege’s performance at the Olive Grove as a “refugee-volunteer”, it seems to me now that Ege amidst the

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crisis on Lesvos was struggling to become visible as something more than mere labour. Indeed, during our first encounters, many times he emphasized to me how, unlike other Pakistani migrants he would never allow himself to be exploited in the agriculture sector, that he would never work for a boss who would underpay him and that in fact he did not come to Europe for work but to be his own boss. Moreover, in early March 2016, he told me: I don’t care even if I get deported, even if I die at the border. At least it will become known that a “refugee-volunteer” who gave his life to/for humanity was deported, I know that this will become known to everyone… Every volunteer here will remember me. You know Aila, don’t ever follow human beings, let them follow you.

Ege, moreover, would criticize the ‘refugees’ “who are after European women and are having fun at the Olive Grove”. During one of my conversations with Ege at the Olive Grove, in early March 2016, something that he said, struck my attention in particular; I see other refugees establish relationships with the female volunteers, I mean they flirt with them, and many volunteers invite them for drinks at Mytilene, hang out with them, and then end up sleeping with them. They establish relationships and have fun, especially, with Moroccan and Syrian guys and then they return back to their countries. They are fake volunteers. But I do not get involved with such stuff. While they are partying, I am doing my night shifts. This is why the senior volunteers of Olive Grove respect me here. Apart from the fact that I am one of the longest-term volunteers, here, they can give me a medal for not having been involved sexually with any girl, for not having wasted my time partying.

Ege found himself, in other words, within a context where some subjects were entitled to indulge into sexual pleasures and enjoy sexual freedom; according to Ege, the ‘European’ volunteers, whose freedom of mobility, the very fact that they were able to move from (North) Europe to Lesvos and depart on their own accord, was tied to their “right to sexual freedom”. And vice versa; their right to sexual freedom was conditioned upon their right to mobility, as “positionality and passport bestows the Western subject with unprecedented opportunities to engage in travel that frequently involves exploring, experimenting and indulging in personal journeys of sensual and sexual discoveries of Self and Other” (Ahmad

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2009, p. 318). Where the Other in the case of the ‘refugee crisis’, becomes the ‘refugee’, those “other refugees”, “are hanging out and enjoying drinks with the volunteers in the evenings, while, I am working hard, doing night shifts, supporting the projects and desires of volunteers to help, many of which have come to Greece to experience refugees” (Personal Conversation with Ege, Olive Grove, Lesvos, March 2016). Back then, I remember feeling disturbed at his words without being able to pinpoint exactly what it was that was making me feel uncomfortable. Looking back now, I realize how I, myself, became confined to Ege’s view on ‘volunteer women’. His approach, which I took to be the ‘refugee’s approach, enraptured me and, thus, did not allow me to be myself . Already from those early days, during my encounter with Ege at the Olive Grove, I understood that at the border on Lesvos in order for one to survive, physically and emotionally, one must not be herself. If Ege had to perform the role of the ‘deserving refugee’, I felt that I had to perform the role of the ‘deserving volunteer’, the ‘real volunteer’ or rather of the deserving woman volunteer in order to be distinguished and accepted by Ege and every other refugee. Ege, like many other people who I met and who had been racialized as migrants or refugees, struggled to prove that he was not like the other refugees, that he was different, exactly because, even if momentarily, such an attributed differentiation was awarded. Similarly, I felt compelled to prove to Ege and to the other refugees at the Olive Grove that I was not like the other volunteers, that I was somehow different and willing to go much further. That I was not engaged in voluntourism, that I was here to stay. The “sexual–economic structural inequality that operates at multiple levels through the maintenance of various legal, material and symbolic borders” (Ahmad 2009, p. 319) turned the Olive Grove, right outside the hotspot, into a space where harsh and hurtful judgments/accusations were being made from all directions. And for those arriving from the wrong side of the border, such judgments became a matter of life and death. As an activist from ‘Olive Grove’ told me, “Imagine what it means to set up a no-borders solidarity space right outside the hotspot. How long do you think such a space can survive, how long do you think we will survive?”. That is, as well as being a wonderful and inspiring space of solidarity and resistance, at the Olive Grove, there was an atmosphere of violent categorizations along the lines of who is the real refugee, and who is the real volunteer or activist. The problem was that we were performing

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these roles not only to the ‘people in charge’ but to one another and most importantly to our own selves. – But why are you overidentifying with your passport? A good friend asked me in April 2016, in Athens. – Because that is all he sees. He is obsessed with the passport. I responded. – What about you, my friend asked me once again. – Silence. (Dialogue titled “I am not my passport” based on a conversation with a very close friend in Athens, April 2016). In relation to the above context, it is important, therefore, to reflect on how my own trajectories as a ‘researcher’ at the Olive Grove were (re)directed by imposed sexualized identities and how in turn my performance was shaped by representations and ‘vocabularies of hotspots’. Thus, I ask: How did my behaviour as a PhD researcher and a woman internalize the logic of the hotspot and notions of deservingness and un-deservingness? How much was my way of relating to people tied to the scene of the crisis? Why did Ege in order to be seen had to exit the obscene and from a ‘Pakistani’ enter the scene as a ‘refugee-volunteer’? And most importantly, why in order to be loved one must first be seen?

Painful Translations But anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification, for it is in the painful process of this translation that we identify who are our allies with whom we have grave differences, and who are our genuine enemies. (Audre Lorde, 1984, p. 127)

The Refugee-Volunteer At the end of April 2016 while volunteers at the Olive Grove packed up the tents and other infrastructures for Thessaloniki to begin their new projects, Ege, also, packed his belongings and boarded the ferry for Athens, as he had officially entered the asylum procedure. In this way,

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he left one identity for another; that of the “refugee-volunteer” (as he put it) volunteering at the Olive Grove for the “asylum applicant”. In other words, he was hoping to be acknowledged as a “refugee”, to gain the political status of the “refugee”, as a Baluch activist. The journey from Lesvos to Athens delineates new forms, strategies and struggles of visibility and invisibility. In this way, migrants’ strategies create links between the islands and the mainland that escape the official accounts of a migrant’s journey by governmental actors and scholars alike. Although Ege had been identified as a “Pakistani”, unlike the Pakistanis that I discussed in the previous chapter, he managed to leave Lesvos and take the ferry to Athens, thanks to the ‘Olive Grove’ organization that had helped him to receive his protection card (asylum applicant’s card), book an interview date in Athens and a ticket for the ferry. “Back then this card was the most important thing anyone could give me, it helped me to cross a border but now after having arrived and lived in Athens for a while, it has become useless, it does not help me to cross other borders here, on the contrary it has created itself borders, it is a border by itself”, Ege had told me, a few months later in Athens. Ege was pointing out to a shift from the category of the “refugee-volunteer” to the asylum applicant and the different strategies of visibility/invisibility that are involved. Indeed, during the time of the “Pakistani issue” prior to the EU–Turkey Deal, he sought refuge at the Olive Grove (just outside the hotspot) not through invisibility but rather he chose to become more “visible” as a ‘refugee-volunteer’: “I fought for a name, to become somebody not just a refugee who was to be given food and clothes, I became a “refugee-volunteer”, was what he told me.2 In the same way that already from the other side of the Aegean, in Izmir (Turkey), Ege wanted to differentiate himself from the ‘mixed flows’ crossing the Aegean, at the Olive Grove at Moria hotspot, he struggled to stand out from the other refugees by not appearing as “just another refugee in a queue waiting to be served food, clothes and a tent at the Olive Grove”, as he put it. In other words, the identity of the ‘refugee-volunteer’, enabled him to be perceived by the volunteers at the Olive Grove as an individual invested with agency and not as a part of 2 See also Spathopoulou A (2016) The ferry as a mobile hotspot: Migrants at the uneasy borderlands of Greece. Society and Space, 15 December. Available at: https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/the-ferryas-a-mobile-hotspot-migrantsat-the-uneasy-borderlands-of-greece (accessed 15 February 2022)

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a passive multiplicity subjected to enactments of charity. On the other hand, by performing the active-activist refugee through the role of the ‘refugee-volunteer’, Ege was refusing his categorization as an ‘economic migrant’ due to his (ascribed) nationality. Racialized as an ‘underserving economic migrant’ at the borders of Europe, upon his arrival on Lesvos Ege understood that it would not be easy to be recognized as a refugee through the asylum system. He had to convince both the authorities and the volunteers that he was a Baluch, a political activist, and, hence, a political refugee. By turning to his linguistic capital, Ege through enactments of translation came up with a new identity, that of the ‘refugee-volunteer’. Since he spoke perfect English, Urdu, Farsi and a little bit of Turkish, Ege was useful both for the volunteers at the Olive Grove and the authorities inside the hotspot, especially, at the beginning of March, when everyone at the Olive Grove was trying to solve the ‘Pakistani Issue’. In other words, thanks to Ege’s linguistic and cultural capital, the fact that he had been educated in the urban setting of the megapolis of Islamabad and by a middle-class family, he was able to differentiate himself from the other Pakistanis, even though his official nationality was Pakistani. Through translation, he was able to help as he put it to me, “all the different groups at the Olive Grove, the Westerners and the refugees and even help the Pakistanis, the Punjabis, who in Pakistan are my oppressors”. In his words: Translation gives me the freedom to move around the Olive Grove and Lesvos, at any moment of the day or night, as there is always the need for translation with the refugees, it is a 24-hour occupation and you are always on call {…} At the Olive Grove, I gave more than 100 percent of my time, when other refugees were in a hurry to move on, I gave my soul as a volunteer and never refused to translate. It also helps me to keep my mind busy in these difficult times.

Ege through translation was refusing to participate in the violence that the binaries between ‘economic migrant’ versus ‘refugee’ (re)produce and the degrees of deservingness that are attached to them, as well as being “actively” and “passively” engaged in the escalating situation leading up to the EU–Turkey Deal. Along these lines, I argue that Ege used “translation as a method” (Meier and Spathopoulou, forthcoming) in order to access the asylum and humanitarian system/spaces. Thanks to his role as

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a translator, he was able to move inside and outside of the hotspot. Translation as a method helped him to gain access to particular locations (such as the port, the hotspot, the hospital) and persons (Greek authorities, the police, volunteers, no border activists, journalists and researchers), as well as to the location of the erotic as I will discuss further down. According to Ege, translation is a door into the other’s heart, whereas, through translation he could choose when and where it was fitted to be himself and with whom it was too risky, as he put it. “Translation helps you to understand peoples’ real motives and desires. It helps you to see whether they are sincere in their desire to help you or whether they are using you for their own and organization’s benefit. I cannot be myself with everyone, even with the volunteers and activists”, he told me at the end of March 2016.

During this time, I remember Ege going about the town of Mytilini, from the port to the Olive Grove, with a yellow jacket tagged with the badge of organization NGO ‘Olive Grove’ and the inscription ‘translator’ highlighted underneath. In this way, he stood out among the other refugees in general and the Pakistani group, in particular. “Of course, the police noticed me, they even knew me, but this was my aim” he told me, “to become visible as a translator so I would not be arrested along with the other Pakistanis”. This is yet another example of refusing the logic of the hotspot. The figure of the translator, enabled Ege who, like me, was in search of a new name and a new life, a “new me with which I can feel comfortable to say exactly what I believe. “When I was in Athens, I was an atheist anarchist and I was translating in squats and now on Lesvos, I am translating for the Olive Grove because I am a refugee-volunteer, and I became Ege, who everybody knows as the translator but basically I am helping in everything else that is needed”, he told me. Such translations, I argue, can be particularly painful and demand excessive emotional labour from the people involved, especially those who find themselves on the ‘wrong side’ of the necropolitical border. “This forces us to consider seriously certain people whose ‘translation labour’ we rely on in order to access a particular site, location or group of people, or to facilitate our everydayness at the border” (Meier and Spathopoulou, forthcoming).

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The Researcher-Volunteer Richa Nagar (2019) in her inspiring discussion on “hungry translations” argues that “the political potential of hungry translations lies in this yearning to keep the translations—as well as the relationships that energize and authorize those translations—open and flowing” (p. 20). Ege after his eviction from Idomeni returned to Lesvos, to translate at the border: that is, to reconnect with the people he had established relationships with at the Olive Grove, to dedicate his life to volunteering and helping people, as he put it to me. “I am not interested in the European passport, I am a refugee-volunteer and I want everyone to know me like this”, I heard him say many times. I, also, returned to Lesvos. How much I longed to go with the flow. But translations don’t just flow. They stumble upon the relationships that are meant to energize and authorize them but instead are blocked by racial, patriarchal and class structures that form the foundation of our anti-erotic society (Lorde 1984). Relationships that are blocked by racial deals that in turn cut through our translations, such as the Deal they were planning to implement a few months later between Turkey and the EU and that would cut through the Aegean and our bodies on Lesvos, leaving scars that we would repeatedly return and dig into in order to re-connect with the part of us and the person we loved prior to the Deal. The volunteers and researchers including myself, could relate to Ege, because he was educated, spoke English and was charming, and we could rely on him and his excellent translation to access the hotspot (through understanding what was going on inside), certain groups of migrants (like the 200 Pakistanis) and particularly in my case, a critical view on the ‘refugee crisis’ and of world politics in general that I was desperately in need of and searching for. Through Ege and his translation labour, I gained access to a whole struggle, the Baluchi struggle that until then I was not even aware of and that added a whole new political dimension/perspective to the ‘refugee crisis’ and consequently to my research. In some ways, I can say that I was introduced to the ‘refugee crisis’ on Lesvos through the Baloch struggle because of my involvement with Ege on the first day of my arrival on the island and the ways in which my trajectories as a researcher/volunteer in/to the ‘crisis’ followed his trajectories as a ‘refugee-volunteer’ from Lesvos to Athens. Ege introduced me to the grassroot organization ‘Olive Grove’ and added me to the Lesvos Volunteer what’s up group. He invited me to the various No Borders

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assemblies and meetings that were taking places on the island. He would let me know when and where help was needed (especially with the Greek language, as I spoke Greek). Moreover, he invited me to the meeting that took place at the Olive Grove between the director of the hotspot and the Pakistani group (that I discussed in the previous chapter) in order to understand the kind of translation work that Ege was doing. I can say now, that through Ege, from a researcher on her way to the border I became a volunteer at the border. I was, also, given a name and the title of expertise, the ‘Greek translator’. I became something more than a researcher (an engaged researcher?), as I was turned into a translator at the border. Translation, we can say, became my (incomplete) response to the violence I was encountering both within the research process and at the hotspot and I adopted this method from him. Translation from and into the Greek language was crucial for the people on the move and their supporters. Without realizing it back then, translation became my method of exceeding the boundaries between the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of research and of responding to the violence that these boundaries (re)produce. If, as Spivak argues, the act of hearing-to-respond may be called the imperative to translate, upon my arrival at the Olive Grove at the end of February 2016, it was Ege that I first heard. But how and did I ever respond? Now I understand that: The research that followed was an attempt to respond to Ege whereas the writing of this book constitutes a response to myself that I refused to listen to and how that feels now.

If a few months ago at the border at Idomeni, Ege had to struggle to overcome the physical border, at the Olive Grove on Lesvos, he struggled against the multiple borders that had been erected to keep us apart ‘within’ and ‘outside’ of the hotspot, solidarity spaces and research. Being pushed back from the Idomeni border, Ege returned to Lesvos with the aim to make Lesvos his home as a refugee-volunteer. However, a few months later he was forced to depart once again from the border, from Lesvos, this time because of a Deal that from one day to the next transformed him into a detainable and deportable subject. And his home, Lesvos, into a prison. Everyone was packing their stuff and departing from the island, including his volunteer friends who thanks to their stronger passports were making plans to continue their projects elsewhere

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in Greece, in Europe, without him, or at least this is how he felt. Now I ask: Was it then when the passport became important for you? Was it because of the Deal that the people you loved from activists became Europeans and from your friends your enemies? What about me, am I different?

By gaining the respect and support of the volunteers he managed to escape detention inside the hotspot. In this sense, translation was used, also, as a method of refusing the hotspot logic and its materialization with the implementation of the EU–Turkey Deal. That is, against the modus operandi, Ege entered the hotspot with a lawyer who managed to get him an asylum applicant’s card and a date for an interview in Athens, without having to remain in detention on the island. In other words, Ege gained his ‘right to the ferry’ and our right to travel together to Athens, that is, where he wanted to travel to and with whom on the upper deck of the ferry. Ege refused to succumb to the specific route that the hotspot had mapped out for him and departed from the scene of the ‘crisis’ never to return (at least not together). Indeed, in the months leading up to the implementation of the EU– Turkey Deal (December 2015 to March 2016), the route a migrant would take was very much based on two factors: one’s nationality and the date of one’s arrival, not only on the hotspot island but also at the mainland northern border. As soon as the EU–Turkey Deal was implemented (i.e., on March 20, 2016), whether one had arrived prior to or after the date of implementation would determine whether one would have to: (a) remain on the island; (b) would be transferred to another hotspot island3 ; (c) would be allowed to take the ferry to Athens (Pireaus) or to Kavala (two mainland passenger ferry ports); (d) would be relocated to ‘Europe’ through the quota system or (e) would be deported back to Turkey. Stuck between a family that was pushing him to move forward to Germany and a Deal that was pushing him back to Turkey, Ege found himself on Lesvos, at the epicentre of the ‘border spectacle’: among

3 For instance, in the summer of 2016, on the pretext of space related issues, many Syrian migrants were transferred from Lesvos hotspot to Leros hotspot and were granted asylum soon after. However, this coincided with rumours of a plan by the Greek government to transform Moria hotspot on Lesvos island exclusively into a pre-deportation centre.

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volunteers, activists, rubber boats arriving on the shores, Syrian families, grandmothers feeding babies, locals welcoming refugees, all of which set up the scene of the ‘refugee crisis’. Being classified, however, as an ‘economic migrant’, he was transferred from the scene and into the obscene of the ‘crisis’, pushing him into ever more dire predicaments during his determination to try to live a full and authentic life. Stuck between my obligation to complete my doctoral degree (and return to London) and my desire to remain on Lesvos, I encountered Ege at the scene and followed him into the obscene of the crisis. There I encountered a complex whole person whose needs and desires were constantly thwarted or truncated by his circumstances, including by our own encounter and my own need and desire to live a full and authentic life as a woman located at the border. Thus, I now wonder: How can we live a full and authentic life together in and out from the scene of the crisis?

Translation and the Erotic: My Departure and Return to Lesvos One might ask, as the song does, what’s love got to do with it? My own immediate, intimate experience when facing the text I am translating, or that I am reading in order to evaluate if I want to translate it, is one of engagement—with the text, the word, and ultimately, the world. And this engagement, on this most basic level, could be deemed “erotic”. (Katherine Silver, “The erotic place of translation”, 2009) Two women exchange poems. Each looks at the other’s words, furtive, excited. Perhaps they despair at not being ‘good enough’ for each other. Then the risk of a more intent look, startling, drawing closer. Then they begin to translate, the hands are involved now, one thing leads to another, and before you know it their tongues are in each other’s mouth. (Susan Holbrook, “Mauve Arrows and the Erotics of Translation”, 1997, p. 232)

At the beginning of March 2016, I took the ferry from Lesvos to Samos to meet up with Karlos who I had met during my first visit to Samos from Turkey in July 2015. I wanted to see how Karlos was doing, and if he was managing to move on after his release from prison. How was he feeling, having just exited from one prison only to return to his ‘home-island’ and encounter another prison, this time a whole prison-island where “his cousins, friends and relatives were being held captive”, as he put it to me?

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Moreover, I felt the need to talk to someone who had not arrived with the ‘refugee crisis’ at the border, whether as a ‘refugee’, a ‘migrant’ or a ‘volunteer’; someone, who could tell me that before the ‘crisis’ things were also hard, even harder, and, yet they had survived. My feelings, however, were ambivalent on that ferry journey from Lesvos to Samos. I remember feeling that I was leaving from an epicentre, indeed, an epicentre of a crisis but, also, of solidarity, resistance and love to a periphery where things were calmer and less intense. “We here on Samos are always behind in relation to what goes on in Lesvos. When a new policy measure takes place on Lesvos, we know that our turn will come” is what a border official had told me at the Vathi hotspot on Samos, at the beginning of March 2016. The fact that I was departing from Lesvos made me feel that I would be missing out in something, as if I was leaving from the central stage where all the important things were happening and where actual resistance was taking place. Moreover, I felt that I hadn’t heard, said and done enough on Lesvos. That my translation was incomplete. There was so much more that needed to be translated, so many unfinished sentences! A feeling of incompleteness overwhelmed me on the ferry from Lesvos to Samos that stuck to me during my whole stay on Samos. “Volunteers want arriving boats, muddy campsites and lots of refugees. Volunteers are addicted to hard and challenging situations, they don’t want to be just sitting around, they need to feel they are in a war zone, that they are needed, in order not to passed as mere tourists”, is what an activist from ‘Olive Grove’ had told me on Lesvos. Spontaneously, I now write: How many translations were left incomplete during our time on Lesvos? How many dialogues but, also, emotions, relationships and confrontations were left incomplete? An atmosphere of incompleteness dominated the Olive Grove outside Moria hotspot on Lesvos. It was, also, a matter of time. People were eager to move forward, to catch the next ferry so that they could make it on time to the border. How many times, I was engaged in an intense conversation with someone that was suddenly interrupted because of the Deal and that I hoped to continue the following day, only to see they had left that morning without a goodbye. Our conversation meant nothing to you, I wondered. How to translate a goodbye, you once asked me. So many people refused to translate, refused to even say a goodbye. There was no time for attachments. You said goodbye. But you returned. To translate, you said. Is translation an act of repetition or does it take place in an instance?

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I returned to Lesvos by ferry one week later. I texted Ege when I boarded the ferry in the evening. “My heart is on that boat” Ege had responded to me. Governed by intense emotions, on that ferry, I was drawing upon the (uneven) geographies of emotions that prevailed within the landscape(s) of the ‘refugee crisis’: sadness, fear, guilt, admiration, happiness, exhaustion, disappointment, anger and love. I remember that it was on that ferry journey back to Lesvos, that I first started to reflect on questions of autonomy and dependency within and outside of research. I asked myself: Was I mapping out my own autonomous route from Samos to Lesvos or did I become “the prisoner of my own journey feelings and emotions within the research”? Was I in control of my research’s orientation, or was it directed by my own emotions, insecurities and desires? And vice versa: Had Ege become a prisoner of my research, was he dependent on the trajectory my research was taking because as a ‘research subject’ he gained his right to move through it? This, also, poses a question around the ethics of engaged and participatory research, since what is at stake here is whether it is ethical for so-called activist or engaged researchers to write about people and situations that they are directly impacting and affecting, particularly through personal relations and feelings. In other words, while I was positioning my research against a system that was turning islands into prisons, was my research by becoming more and more involved in peoples’ trajectories and lives, turning their hearts into prisons through emotions that kept them stuck at the border? For example, Ege a few years later, told me in Athens that he remained in Greece because of me, that I had kept him in this prison, otherwise he would have moved on. Although I am aware now that this statement functioned as a pretext for demanding me to fulfil what normally should be the state’s obligations towards him, it obligates me in my writing at the very least to acknowledge my role when I am discussing people’ entrapment in Greece. We must, I argue, reflect more on the interconnections between engaged and encaged/-ing research (see also Heney and Poleykett 2021). In her text “The erotic place of translation” Katherine Silver (2009) provides us with a few comments on the world ‘engagement’: Rather than use the English participial adjective, “engaged,” we often use the French term. Somehow, the phrase “littérature engagée” has a deeper resonance than “engaged literature” does in English; the French clearly refers to a more conscious tradition. In order to define “engaged literature” in English, one can turn to an internal translation and say “committed literature” or

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even, though much less explicitly in the U.S. context, “politically committed literature.” To further complicate matters, English uses the word “involved” to talk about somebody who is active in politics. The most common translation into Spanish for “engaged” and “politically involved” is “comprometido,” or “committed,” wherein the “political” is implicit and the involvement is explicit. The place where these meanings overlap in English is when we are talking about a pre-marital arrangement, where commitment, engagement, and involvement become one. Which brings us headlong into “erotic.”

In Greek “engagement” is translated into “ασχoλ´ια” and involvement ´ “εμπλoκη”. In Urdu, we use the word molavis when referring to “engagement” and it is the same in Baluchi, however, according to Ege in Baluchi it is more about being occupied. Interestingly, ‘occupied’ implies being busy with something, and, hence, unavailability, but also being under occupation, such as Baluchistan he told me. Being engaged can also be experienced as occupation, I told him. Was I committed to him or to the refugee? I write a few months later, in July 2016, in Athens. Now I understand that: The answer you give is an act of translation.

The answer, moreover, speaks of “a relation between self and other through a hunger for ongoing translations despite the unevenness of the terrain on which such translations take place” (Nagar 2019, p. 14). But when the Deal was implemented and we were told that some of us must stay put (on the island) and others should move on, translation takes the form of a refusal (Nagar 2019) and the erotic becomes a method with which to remain together despite our differences, despite the Deal, with which to remain together because of differences and because of being ourselves (Lorde 1984). As Katherine Silver reflects in the “Erotic Place of Translation”: might we see this dynamism, this imperfect harmony, the struggle to become, as lending translation the freedom rather than the onus of placelessness, the privilege of living in the interstice, both temporally and spatially, the elation of engagement and involvement without attachment? (August 4, 2009)

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By boarding together, the ferry on the 15th of April 2016, we were “lending translation the freedom” beyond the attachment to a specific route, date of arrival, place and identity and our right to become something else together beyond the hotspot reality and the fixed subjectivities that it imposed, also, along lines of sexuality, such as that of the ‘tourist’, ‘refugee’, ‘economic migrant’, ‘volunteer’, ‘interpreter’, ‘activist’ and ‘researcher’. We refused to belong to the specific times and spaces that were constructed around the Deal. We refused to stay put on Lesvos; we refused to move forward. On that ferry journey, through the erotic mutual subjectivity, the constituted relationship between the method and content of my research was formulated (Nayak 2017).

Conclusion: Our Departure from Lesvos On the ferry (20th of April 2016). It was a cold and windy night. The ferry departed from Lesvos at nine o clock in the evening. It was heading to Piraeus port, in Athens. Ege, a refugee dog from Syria named Zak and I, were departing together from Lesvos. I remember feeling complete in that journey and so did my research because we were departing together; back then, I felt, I was not leaving anything behind; I felt free (what an illusion!). Outside on the deck. It was cold and windy. Two bodies in a sleeping bag and a dog. A ferry transferring two bodies across the internal border that separated Lesvos from the mainland, from Athens. A ferry crossing the many internal borders that kept us apart. Above us, the moon and the stars, what felt then contrary to the sea, a borderless space. There is something quite erotic in an atmosphere with No Borders. Only now do I understand, as I write the pages of this book, how the erotic as method helps me to reconcile with my feelings that were taking place within the obscene of the ‘refugee crisis’ and that continue to affect my existence even after the ‘crisis’. It is the “erotic as power”, a method “between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings” (Lorde 1984, p. 54), that encourages me to face what was truly ‘me’ once the ‘crisis’ was said to be over.

References Ahmad, Ali Nobil. (2009). Bodies That (Don’t) Matter: Desire, Eroticism and Melancholia in Pakistani Labour Migration. Mobilities, 4(3), 309–327.

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Ahmed, S. (2006). Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press. Broersma, F., & Lazarescu, D. (2009). Pakistani and Bangladeshi Migration to Greece: Chasing the Dream. European Commission: Brussels. Carastathis, Anna, and Tsilimpounidi, Myrto. (2020). Reproducing Refugees: Photographía of a Crisis. London: Rowman and Littlefield. Drabinski, J. (2019). Frantz Fanon. Plato.standford.edu. Fanon, F. (1952). The Fact of Blackness. Postcolonial Studies: An anthology, 15(32): 2–40. Heney, V. (2020). Unending and Uncertain: Thinking Through a Phenomenological Consideration of Self-Harm Towards a Feminist Understanding of Embodied Agency. Journal of International Women’s Studies, 21(3): 7–21. Heney, V., and Poleykett, B. (2021). The Impossibility of Engaged Research: Complicity and Accountability Between Researchers, ‘Publics’ and Institutions. Sociology of Health & Illness. Holbrook, S. (1997). Mauve Arrows and the Erotics of Translation. Essays on Canadian Writing, (61): 232. Lorde, A. (1984). Sister Outsider. Berkeley Nagar, R. (2019). Hungry Translations: The World Through Radical Vulnerability: The 2017 Antipode RGS-IBG Lecture. Antipode, 51(1): 3–24. Nail, Thomas. (2015). The Figure of the Migrant. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Nayak, Suryia. (2017). Location as Method. Qualitative Research Journal, 17(3): 202–216. Silver, K. (2009). The Erotic Place of Translation. Beyond Words Translating the World: 11–13. Spathopoulou, Aila, and Carastathis, A. (2020). Hotspots of Resistance in a Bordered Reality. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 38(6): 1067–1083. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775820906167.

CHAPTER 6

Exiting the Hotspot

‘Syrian refugees’ Entering and Exiting from the ‘Field’ As we saw in the previous chapters, my first ‘official’ research encounter with the ‘refugee crisis’ on Lesvos was through the lenses of the Pakistani’ refusal to enter the hotspot and Ege’s engagement at the Olive Grove as a ‘refugee-volunteer’. This was prior to the implementation of the EU– Turkey Deal, at a time when people from Syria had the right to the ferry and were able to depart from Greece and move on to northern Europe. At least, this is what I believed, caught up with the images of people who identified as Syrians (and who were being referred to as such) arriving at the port and then departing after a few days, reassuring in this way the locals who were supporting them that refugees will not remain on ‘their’ island. By the time I arrived at the Olive Grove at the end of February 2016, unlike all the other nationalities, Syrians were being transferred to the Kara Tepe camp for registration, a camp run by the municipality and that a few months later would be transformed into a humanitarian camp for those classified as vulnerable asylum seekers. During this time, I came across with the frustration of other migrant nationalities, such as Afghanis who argued that Syrians were being favoured by the authorities, were given priority in the registration process and were allowed to leave the island much faster. As we saw at the beginning of Chapter 2, people © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Spathopoulou, Bordering and Governmentality Around the Greek Islands, Mobility & Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08589-5_6

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with a ‘migrant background’ or so-called ‘second generation migrants’ were also pointing out how fast Syrian refugees were making their way through the system and receiving documents while they themselves who had been in Greece for many years or were even born in the country were still struggling to obtain legal documents. I had sporadic conversations with Syrians, however, as they were being ‘pushed forward’ by the authorities from the islands to the mainland and out of Greece, there was not enough time to establish in depth relationships, as in the case with the Pakistanis who were stuck on Lesvos and more established migrants, like Karlos who had arrived on Samos prior to 2015 and who had been living for many years on the island. In their case, my research had grabbed upon their waiting time/time of waiting, as they were waiting to leave the island, waiting to obtain legal documents, waiting to get the Greek citizenship. Thus, I ask now: Did the Syrians have to get stuck on the island in order to become part of my research? Did they have to end up waiting so that I could relate to them?

What I would understand later, was how this differential treatment or what was being referred to by other people on the move as a favoured treatment regarding the Syrian refugees’ mobility from the Greek islands, concerned mobility that was, nevertheless, regulated, in other words, governed according to specific rules. People arriving from Syria had to agree with the script that was set out for them and perform the role of the ‘deserving refugee’. Refusing to follow the script set out within the relocation route, for example, by attempting to move autonomously out of Greece and towards a country of one’s own choice (and not the country that was allocated to them), is met with a certain degree of suspicion by the authorities, as their refusal is interpreted as disobedience and their performed agency as a proof that they are not ‘real refugees’. As I will discuss further down, people who were being channelled through the relocation program, were at risk of being criminalized through the very procedure of relocation. As Robin from Damascus told me, each step within the relocation program contained a mine, a hidden bomb, so that if you didn’t watch where you stepped, a bomb could explode; and from a deserving Syrian refugee you are approached as a potential Syrian terrorist. The criminalization of the ‘economic migrant’ in the months following the implementation of the EU–Turkey Deal, that I discussed in the previous chapters, culminates in the criminalization of

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the refugee. In other words, the relocation scheme of Syrian refugees smoothly transited into the accelerated border procedure through which Syrian refugees would be channelled, as discourses around deservingness and un-deservingness, distinctions between real-refugees and bogus refugees, were already at stake in the Relocation Program. Hotspots introduce the accelerated border procedure for asylum claimants arriving on the five islands and make possible the geographical restrictions that were imposed with the implementation of the EU–Turkey Deal, while differentiating populations in terms of their nationalities, dates of arrival, and corresponding degrees of deservingness (Spathopoulou et al. 2020).1 I remember how Kalia, a Syrian refugee who had been waiting for six months to be relocated to a country other than his choice, put it to me in a conversation that we had on the Relocation Program, in the summer of 2016 in Viktoria square in Athens: “I am not in control.” Now I write: And, through the restrictions/limitations of the Relocation Program, they entered the confinements of my research.

The Relocation Program From the outset the hotspot system has been conceived in conjunction with the relocation program. The relocation scheme set up by Council Decisions (EU) 2015/1523 and 2015/1601 in September 2015, for a target of 160,000 asylum seekers, was designed as an emergency measure to alleviate pressure on Italy and Greece and constitutes a partial derogation to the Dublin Regulation rules.2 It was presented as an enactment of intra-European solidarity towards those frontline EU member states, such as Greece and Italy, that were baring the “unprecedented pressure” caused by “thousands of migrants” (EC 2015, pp. 2, 4) arriving at the external borders of Europe, in 2015 and the first months of 2016. 1 The “fast-track border procedure” on the Greek islands of Lesvos, Chios, Samos, Leros and Kos, initially framed as a derogation from standard procedural rules reserved for exceptional circumstances of “mass arrivals” and set up with a view to implementing the EU-Turkey Statement, ran uninterrupted from spring 2016 to the end of 2021. It has accounted for almost half of the country’s asylum caseload, far above any country applying border procedures in the EU” (RSA, 2022) at: https://rsaegean.org/en/bor der-procedure-greek-islands/. 2 Asylum Service: http://bit.ly/2DQN0q2.

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However, out of the target of 66,400 asylum seekers to be relocated from Greece, 21,731 had effectively been transferred as of 28 January 2018 (GCR 2018). Indeed, only a highly selected migrant population was eligible for the relocation, since “it applies to nationalities of applicants with an EU-wide average recognition rate of 75% or higher”, and, to those who arrived prior to the implementation of the EU–Turkey Deal. Specifically, the relocation mechanism was in place only for those who entered Greece before 20 March, 2016 (between 16 September 2016 and 19 March 2016); Iraqis who had been registered after July 1 were excluded from the relocation; the pre-registration procedure was applicable only for those who arrived between 1 January, 2015 and March 20, 2016. Through the ‘relocation approach’ we see how the ‘European question’, that is, where is “Europe,” who is “European,” and, what, indeed, is “Europe” (De Genova 2016), becomes tied to the ‘refugee/migration question’, that is, who are the ‘real-refugees’, and where do these (very few) ‘real refugees’ ought or rather deserve to go. All those asylum applicants who are not classified as (being) ‘refugees’ enough, should remain in Greece, a country that is perceived, also, by the people on the move as ‘quasiEuropean’. The liminal position of Greece within Europe (and within the institutions comprising ‘EUrope’) has been intensified by the European management of the ‘double crises’; the financial and refugee crisis. The fact that the institution of hotspots directly involves European agencies in the national process of asylum adjudication is telling in this regard. Thus, I argue, the ‘Greek hotspot puzzle’ or ‘minefield’ as Robin described it was constructed as following: On the one hand, all those ‘quasi-refugees’ (such as Afghanis) are forced to remain in a ‘quasiEuropean’ space, in “Greek Eu-rope” (Stierl 2017), while all ‘economic migrants’, such as Pakistanis, must be deported to a ‘non-European’ location, Turkey. The uneven geographies of the hotspot regime and the categorizations/hierarchies that it establishes within the ‘migrant mob’ (Tazzioli 2017) draw upon the uneven geographies of Europe, so that hierarchies within the migrant population correlate with existing hierarchies in Europe along the lines of ‘North/South’, the ‘East/West’ and ‘core/periphery’ dichotomies. –Where am I located within the ‘North/South’ dichotomy?

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As someone who has grown up as half Greek and half Scottish, this question has been troubling me all my life. And then there was Turkey…. –You are located on Lesvos, but it all depends on where you will go next… –But this does not depend on me, I responded, as did so many other people on the move that I had asked the same question. (Dialogue that I created based on my conversations with Syrian refugees in May 2017 and that were part of the relocation program. Titled: Where will you go next?)

From the ‘Unruly Subject’ at the Border to the ‘Beneficiary’ of the Relocation Program From the Border (Lesvos) to Athens, from Athens to the Border (Idomeni) and Back As soon as the the EU–Turkey Deal was implemented on 20th March, 2016, all asylum seekers (that is, those who had been allowed to apply for asylum or who were considered eligible to apply based on their nationality) and that were already on the five border islands, were ferried to various military-controlled camps on the mainland for their asylum cases to be processed. In this Chapter, I explore whether and how does one exit the hotspot. On one such ferry, Robin from Idlib was being transferred to Athens. Robin arrived on Lesvos at the beginning of February 2016 (that is before the date of March 20), however, he was not able to Lesvos after being registered, as the ferries were full due to the ongoing circulation of asylum applicants from the islands to the mainland.3 Robin, therefore, decided to remain on Lesvos for a little longer, to gather some money before moving forward. At the beginning of March, he started to work for little money at a canteen that was placed at the entrance of the hotspot, one of the many that had appeared outside the hotspot since it started to operate. During this time, Robin moved into a house with a volunteer friend in Mytilene town. When I met Robin in Exarchia Square in Athens the following year, he told me that, on Lesvos, he had gained a feeling of calmness and hopefulness after months of being on the move. This calmness and hopefulness had been lost in Athens.

3 At the ticket office in the port, they told him that the next available ticket was for the end of February.

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The day that the Deal was put into force, Robin realized that the situation was changing rapidly and Lesvos from a space of transit and hopefulness was being transformed into a space of containment and despair for refugees, even for Syrians. Moreover, a guard at the entrance of the hotspot that he had become friendly with advised him to pack his stuff and obey what the megaphones at Moria hotspot had announced the day prior to the implementation of the Deal; (that) all those people who had received the international protection card must board the ferry to the mainland. “You never know if you will get a chance to leave afterwards”, was what the guard had told him. And this is what he did. Although he wanted to go to North-Greece, the ferries for Kavala were full for the following two weeks, so he took the first available ferry for Athens. When Robin arrived in Athens, he felt completely lost and alone; “it was a complete chaos”. He decided to take the train for Idomeni at the Greek Macedonian border and from there, through the ‘Balkan route’ try to make his way up to Sweden, where his elder sister lived. At Idomeni he discovered that the borders had closed for all nationalities and that the prices that the smugglers were asking from the people in order to cross through less visible routes had increased. And there was no guarantee that one would not be pushed back from one of the many borders along the road. Robin was not up for such a struggle. He decided that he would return to Athens and try to figure out his life through ‘legal’ means. It was during his time at Idomeni that the UNHCR informed him about his right to register in the relocation program; however, in order to do this, he was forced to move to one of the many camps that were being set up by the military in the interior of the country. By using the “relocation card”, UNHCR was trying to convince Robin, to move away from the border (similarly to how the authorities had persuaded him to leave Lesvos), as well as to keep him away from the capital city of Athens. This reminded me of how Ege a few months earlier was evicted from the same location at Idomeni by police forces. Even though Ege’s departure was more violently enforced, like Robin’s departure, it proceeded under the gaze of the UNHCR who played an active role in forcing people to depart. UNHCR convinced Robin to board one of their buses, and, along the geographies of the ‘mobile hotspot’, he was transferred to a camp outside the city of Kavala, in northern Greece. Robin’s journey within Greece, resonates with what the authors of “Interventions on the state of sovereignty at the border” see as “the emergence of new corridors where

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people on the move use technologies to subvert authority and survive the transit through dangerous and unwelcoming places, while the presence of state and non-state actors funnel people to particular routes” (Jones and Johnson, Brown, Popescu, Pallister-Wilkins, Mountz, & Gilbert 2017, p. 1). Indeed, as soon as Robin entered the camp, he understood what was (really) at stake; the transportation of refugees into isolated and makeshift camps on the Greek mainland, with the promise that soon or later EASO and the UNHCR would visit the camp and register everyone in the relocation program. Robin told me about the following regarding his first day of arrival at the camp: I was not stupid to believe such fairy tales. I refused to remain in the camp, and I demanded that they transfer me immediately to the bus station in Kavala and buy me a ticket for a bus to Athens. They policemen there started to shout to me, telling me that I had to stay here, that the EU demanded this and that I could not move to Athens. But I insisted on showing them my asylum applicant’s card that there was no such indication inscribed that I was forced to remain in a camp, no geographical restriction to any specific place and that I had, therefore, every right to move to Athens. And that if they did not take me themselves to the station, I would walk myself. So, I turned my back to them and started to walk, they again tried to stop me, and I demanded that I talk to the UNHCR, they knew that they could not stop me. They finally took me to the station and after four hours I arrived in Athens. I felt bad for those other refugees that thought that they were forced to remain in a camp. (Personal Conversation with Robin, October 2016, Athens)

In the above lengthy quote, we see how Robin exercised his “right to the city”, the city of Athens, at a time, when the Greek authorities were trying to keep migrants away from the cities and border areas. Robin refused to obey the authorities’ plan and international organizations’ practice of assisting only those who agreed to their encampment. Thus, he moved autonomously to Athens where he would decide what he should do next. Robin had made up his mind that he did not want to move on ‘illegally’. He would try to get himself to “Europe” through the relocation program. Even though he knew that he would, possibly, arrive faster in Sweden if he took the ‘illegal route’ than through the ‘relocation route’, and that by becoming a beneficiary of the relocation program would involve a

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prolonged time of waiting in Greece, he wanted to play it “according to the rules of the game”, as he put it to me. He would understand, however, that even playing it by the rules of the game, was a struggle and that he had to give a fight to even register in the program. Although Robin fulfilled all the criteria to participate in the relocation program (nationality and date of arrival), he was forced to confront different actors, waiting lists, long lines outside closed doors and clashes with the authorities. This was what the EU had deemed as an act of solidarity towards deserving refugees and frontline member states in dealing with the ‘refugee crisis’. I had asked Robin the following question but received no answer just silence. –What will happen if you refuse to join the relocation program? –Silence.

After a few months he told me the following: Only crazy people remain in Greece. People who have missed the train, their chance to leave. People who have already lost all hope and are wasting their time, their life, those who have giving up and just smoke drugs all days. I am not like them. I want to make something with my life, I want to move on to a proper country where I can make a life.

Once Robin arrived in Athens at the beginning of April (2016) he faced, what is one of the largest issues that people on the move experience in Athens; homelessness. Robin didn’t have much money left on him, and the cheapest hotel rooms around Omonia and Viktoria squares in the centre of Athens were full since migrants had suddenly found themselves stranded in Athens. Here we see how the hegemonically constructed subject of the “refugee crisis”, is being excluded from the daily life of the city, as their legitimacy as a ‘refugee’ is conditioned upon their transportation to a camp. “As it is easier for me to reach Germany illegally, the only way to be in Athens, is, also, without documents, because in order to enter the asylum system, I first need to enter a camp”, was what Serhat, a Syrian refugee who I met in June 2016 at Exarchia square and who had refused to move to a camp, told me. Here we encounter what a few years later would become an official policy, the norm: that is, in order to become a resident of a camp one must register and apply for asylum,

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and vice versa; in order to have access to the asylum system on the mainland, one must be residing in an officially recognized camp. Entering a camp, therefore, is, also, a solution to homelessness and to be governed as a ‘potential refugee’ (Apostolova 2016), only because the state does not support refugees’ autonomous existence in the city. For those who want to remain in Greece, the camp, I argue, is experienced as a form of detention where people are forced to remain segregated from the rest of the population and excluded from the urban life, and, thus, yet another border to cross. At Piraeus Port But let us return to Robin. After two nights of sleeping in Omonia square, an Iraqi friend who he knew from Lesvos texted him that he had just arrived from the island and was camping at the E2 gate of Piraeus port, along with many other refugees who were refusing to board buses that were transporting people to governmental camps. Most of the people occupying the port were demanding their ‘right to the border’ (at Idomeni). I remember how Piraeus port within a few weeks was being referred to in official media accounts as a hotspot and as such was being governed by the Greek state and humanitarian organizations. The people on the move, once again, were being identified, registered and fingerprinted by Greek authorities and the UNHCR. Piraeus port, I argue, similarly, to the border at Idomeni, is an example of how the multiplication of informal hotspots materialized on the Greek territory.4 The state and supranational entities through the establishment of informal hotspots, by designating a space as a hotspot, is an attempt to control and dismantle the ‘migrant mob’ (Tazzioli 2017) along the colonial logic of ‘divide and rule’. In the case of the Piraeus port as well as Idomeni, the state’s target was the ‘refugee crowd’ who through their refusal to comply with the ‘hegemonic script’ found themselves in the same location, even though they had been channelled through separate routes and temporalities upon arrival on the hotspot islands. The port of Piraeus forms an example of where the uneven geographies of migrants’ refusal intersect at specific 4 Indeed, during this period (February 2016–June 2016) Piraeus was being referred to as by the media and governmental actors as a hotspot even if it is not officially operating as one (it is not being acknowledged as such by the EU). The transit camp at Piraeus port, was, eventually, evicted at the beginning of June 2016.

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sites. Piraeus port, I argue, found itself at the crossroad of a ‘migration of struggles’, in which migrants’ demands for their right to different locations, such as the border and the city, and their refusal to be transported to a camp, intersect. Robin, during his time at Piraeus, joined all those migrants at the port who were demanding their ‘right to the border’, as he was demanding his ‘right to the city’. UNHCR was handing out leaflets to resisting people asking them to board buses for camps where they would be able to apply for asylum in Greece or relocation to another EU member state. The hotspot tried to catch up with the people on the move to dismantle their struggle, once again, through separation and violent categorizations. As Robin reflected on these days at Piraeus port, he did not really know why he was insisting to remain at the port, since what people were really asking for would never happen; for the borders to reopen. I knew that this was only a dream. But I insisted to remain with my shared tent along with other refugees because I would never accept to be transferred to a camp. If I would be forced to wait in order to move legally to Europe, I was demanding to be respected while waiting and to be able to wait in dignified conditions in the city and not pushed outside the city, abandoned in a military camp, as if I am a criminal. (Based on a Personal Conversation with Robin in October 2016, Athens. Inspired also by my conversations with other refugees who refused to leave Piraeus port)

In the first week of June (2016), EASO’s pre-registration procedure took place that aimed to register and proceed with a further distinction between all those who had arrived prior to the Deal and had reached the mainland; between those that could apply for relocation, those who had the right to apply for asylum in Greece, while, it, also, in great detail informed asylum applicants of their right to return via the IOM Assisted Voluntary Return Program (EASO 2016).5 In other words, EASO’s pre-registration program’s goal was to make sure that all migrants who entered Greece between 1 January 2015 and 20 March 2016 were being registered and fingerprinted. A pre-registration unite was also set up at Piraeus port followed by the dismantling of the unofficial camp in the first weeks of June. Robin was registered by EASO during this time into the ‘relocation program’. Thus, I argue, Robin through the relocation 5 https://www.easo.europa.eu/news-events/greece.

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scheme from the disobedient subject at the port of Piraeus transited into the obedient refugee in Athens and as such he would be governed. As a beneficiary of the ‘relocation program’, Robin was being ‘managed’ by several NGOs which in his words “were making sure he was fit enough to go to Europe”. His very mobility within Greece was being controlled, his behaviour monitored, and his body subjected to medical assessments and check-ups that confirmed that he did not pose a threat to the public order and health. Thus, I argue, the mobile hotspot caught up with Robin through the ‘relocation route’, in the sense that his whole “inside” and “outside”, his mind and his body, was being ‘mapped out’ and scrutinized by state and non-state actors. One morning in early August (2016), Robin called to tell me that he was selected for relocation to the Netherlands. However, he had one more ‘border’ to cross before being able to board a ‘relocation flight’ for Amsterdam. And this was the security interview. It was then that we realized that through the ‘relocation program’ another ‘figure of migration’ was being reproduced; the ‘Syrian terrorist’.

The Security Interview The security interview conducted by the Netherland’s anti-terrorist police was the last interview that Robin had to give in order to guarantee his relocation, based on which the Dutch authorities could still reject him, if they interpreted something in his behaviour and responses as suspicious. This was the case with two people from Syria that I met, who had been selected for relocation to France and Spain, but who did not pass the security interview and whose claims therefore were rejected at the last stage; the first person in Greece and the second in Spain where the security interview took place. One week after the interview, this person was deported from Spain to Greece. In both cases no explanation was given to these two asylum applicants as to why they had been rejected. However, everybody knew the purpose behind the security interview; to identify anything suspicious, any signs that the person posed a threat to that specific country’s public order and national security. Prior to his interview at the Dutch embassy in Athens, Robin asked me whether I thought he looked in any way like a Muslim. “It is funny”, he said to me, “it is one of the first times that I am thinking myself as a Muslim, it is totally absurd. I never gave a damn about religion back in Syria’. Indeed, it was at the Dutch embassy in Athens that Robin would

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experience what it felt like to be approached and categorized as a ‘Muslim’ in Europe. The security interview that forms part of the hotspot approach, shows us how processes of bordering and governmentality around the Greek border islands include the categorization of people into certain identities, such as the ‘Muslim’ or the ‘terrorist’, identities that distort one’s sense of self. On top of having to perform the role of the obedient refugee, Robin understood that by becoming a Syrian refugee in Europe, he was approached as a Muslim, and, thus, he had to be careful of what he said and each step he took. Robin became aware of this during the interview. During the six hour “security” interview at the Dutch embassy, Robin was asked his opinion on various events, such as the Paris attacks in November 2015, or what he thought of the Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria.6 His mobile phone was checked as well as his Facebook account and they asked him whether he ever had a girlfriend, if he did Ramadan, and if he drank alcohol. They asked him one more time whether back in Syria he had served in the military (something that they had asked him when he was applying for relocation since those who had completed their military service in Syria were not eligible for relocation). All the questions that they asked him, the personal and less personal ones, point at an administrative mechanism that probes “Syrian refugees’ guilt, in order to determine who are properly “innocent” and politically innocuous, who will properly ‘integrate’ and respect the European values, and who pose a threat and could potentially become ‘radical Muslims’ (De Genova 2018, p. 1776). As Robin put it, it was during the “security interview” that he understood how it feels to be seen as a Muslim in Europe. And, when I visited Robin in Amsterdam, in late November 2016, about one month 6 The lack of an explicit provision for such a procedure in the Council Decisions creates a vacuum that leaves applicants unprotected. According to GCR’s first-hand information, the interviews conducted in the French embassy, after the initial acceptance of the relocation applicants by France, were proper refugee status determination interviews, going beyond the identification of grounds for applying the exclusion provisions (AIDA, Country Report France, 2017 Update, February 2018, available at: http://bit.ly/2Bs OFmB, 70–71). These interviews were usually conducted by two officers of the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons (OFPRA), with interpretation, but without keeping any kind of record of the procedure. The presence of a legal advisor in those interviews was prohibited. Similar interviews were conducted in the embassy of the Netherlands as well (AIDA, Country Report Netherlands, 2017 Update, March 2018, available at: https://bit.ly/2G7z6Eo, 51–52). (GCR 2018). See: https://www.asylumine urope.org/reports/country/greece/asylum-procedure/relocation.

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after his relocation to the Netherlands, this particular gaze had stuck on him. “In Holland”, he told me, “They observe my every step to make sure that they did not make a mistake by bringing me here. And I need to be grateful all the time for this, that they trusted a Muslim”. The idea of threat that comes along with the evocation of a “security crisis”, I argue, manages to construct the “Syrian refugees” as a problem, an issue to manage and sort out at the borders of “Europe” and beyond. As Anna Carastathis argues, “the appearance of a third ‘crisis’, one of security, is not incidental, as it adds a third dimension of differentiation to the existing ideological-juridical distinction between legitimate supplicants and undeserving ‘economic’ migrants: that is, the terrorist posing as a refugee” (2018a, p. 145). This spectre was raised when a Syrian passport belonging to someone who had been registered in the hotspot on Leros island was found at the scene of the attack in Paris on 13 November 2015, responsibility for which was claimed by ISIS (Traynor 2015; quoted in Carastathis 2018a, p. 145). Thus, we can say that the governance of the ‘Syrian refugee’ incorporates the ideal response to the ‘refugee and migration flows’ as ‘humane’ and ‘efficient’, with the ‘Syrian refugee’ finding herself at the nexus of humanitarianism and militarism (Albahari 2015 in Carastathis 2018a, p. 145). The “security crisis”, I contend, is yet another example of how peoples’ sense of self is being distorted through the hotspot approach. Indeed, many Syrian refugees that I spoke to and who were admitted into the relocation program, told me that they felt that they were being put on the “spot”, treated with suspicion and perceived as potential terrorists, as their very desire to move to Europe was perceived as something suspicious. In other words, their very intention to settle in Europe was being criminalized. If we were just asking for asylum here in Greece, I feel that they would not ask us so many questions, they wouldn’t interrogate us like this, as if we are criminals, the only thing we would have to prove is that we are real refugees in need of protection, that we are not here for a better life, to work, to find a job but for our safety because we are running away from our deaths. And the fact that we come from Syria, a war zone country, is enough to prove this. But now that we are moving to Europe, we have to prove that we are not terrorists, that we are not here to harm and destroy Europe. And how they figure this out? By asking us continuously about our religion, to find out if we are radical Islamists, basically if we follow our religion that is Islam. Greece sees us as refugees, Europe as Muslims. (Based on my conversation

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with Bilal and other refugees who gave the ‘security interview. September 2016, Athens)

From the above account of Bilal, we see how the desire to move to and settle in Europe and even more the materialization of this desire is being interrogated and scrutinized by state authorities. If the economic migrant is being punished because of her desire to migrate for a better life (Apostolova 2016), then the relocated subject is being punished for materializing this desire, for making their dream a reality. Whereas the term “terrorist” is not being used when referring to the ‘economic migrant’ (e.g., the “economic migrant-terrorist”), because the term ‘economic migrant’, already, implies a form of criminality, ‘terrorist’ is used to refer to the ‘Syrian refugee’. In this sense, while reaffirming that the economic migrant is always already guilty—criminalized by definition, and therefore is not eligible to even register to the relocation program but is forced to remain in Greece and/or deported to Turkey—the refugee is not (always) innocent; or cannot be assumed to be (Spathopoulou and Carastathis 2020, p. 9). It is important, therefore, to foreground the profound affinities and continuities between diverse categories of people who move across state borders, variously labelled “migrants” and “refugees”—notably, including the complementarity of their illegalization, securitization, and criminalization (Tazzioli et al. 2018, p. 245).

At the IOM Office in Athens: “We saw so many cheeses” After successfully passing the security interview, Robin along with other twenty asylum applicants from Syria who had, also, been accepted for relocation to the Netherlands, were called at the beginning of October to participate in a seminar that was organized by the IOM in Athens. When I asked Robin in our meeting that followed, how the seminar went, he responded that “all I remember are the different brands of Dutch cheese. They kept us for three hours, I was already hungry and seeing all these images with Dutch cheeses and other food specialities, was a torture!”. Apparently, this was an important aspect of the Dutch culture that the refugees had to learn about. The seminar was part of an induction course to the Netherland’s culture, the culture they would have to ‘integrate into’, their future ‘home’. “There was nothing useful for me to learn in

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that seminar. The presenter explained to us that we must know what to expect in Europe in order to behave according to its rules and values. I felt like saying to her, I thought that we were already supposed to be in Europe” Robin remarked to me. The IOM’s personnel were, in other words, implying that where Robin was located at that very moment, that is, Greece, was not Europe; that Europe was where he was about to be ‘relocated’ to, the Netherlands. Robin said to me, moreover, that as the seminar was coming to an end, the presenter turned to the children that were present in the room. She asked from their parents not to leave their children to run around the room. That when they move to Holland, they must never leave them out of their sight and always take care of them. She added that you can’t just leave them running around as you have been doing until now in the camps, otherwise they will be mad with you in Europe. You must know what to expect in Europe. (Personal Conversation with Robin, September 2016, Athens)

We see how the IOM employee involved in the relocation program, perceived the ‘refugee question’ in relation to the “European Question”, as discussed at the beginning of this Chapter. That refugees “must know what to expect in Europe” implies that the “European culture” and so-called European values are unfamiliar to refugees, whereas the Greek culture and lifestyle is closer to what the refugees are used to, exactly, because of Greece’s assumed proximity to the ‘oriental’ East. At the same time, Greece’s representation as an anarchic space, not quite European, and, thus, where refugees “feel at home” and feel free to do whatever they like, is, something that I came across with from an array of people engaged in the ‘refugee crisis’: Greek citizens, international volunteers and established migrants. Moreover, on many occasions during my research, I observed the way in which local Greeks who held positions within the asylum office, and big NGOs, would turn to ‘Europe’ as the big bad boss’ to convince the refugees to obey their requests or demands, for example, to leave or to remain in a specific location or to keep their children quiet. In other words, to obtain the refugees’ compliance along the lines of “only the obedient refugees deserve to move to Europe’. ‘Europe’ figures as the ‘big boss’ who is there to discipline and keep in order the ‘disobedient’ and ‘unruly’ refugees. ‘Europe’ is, also, being represented as bringing order to a ‘rebellious Greece’ threatening to leave

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the Eurozone and to make sure that it plays the role of the good border guard as a condition to remain within the Schengen Zone. The relocation scheme from Greece (and Italy) officially ended at the end of September 2017, with pending cases running up to early 2018 (GCR 2018). As the hotspot started to unfold its real purpose as a deportation mechanism, every step of arrival became one step closer to one’s departure. The hotspot minefield. Or what I have elsewhere referred to as the ‘hotspot puzzle’. A rather badly constructed puzzle, where pieces are supposed to match with each other, but the result is harmful and painful. People do not just match with countries that pledge for them; people should not just be matched with countries…; people do not just match with each other through their similarities and are disconnected from one another because of their differences. It is the hotspot that draws upon the already existing divisions between countries and turns our bodies into their borders. (Notes from my diary, 20th of September 2017).

Conclusion The hotspot mind-field is full of traps for the people on the move, so that they must be cautious of each step they make, and each turn they take. As we saw in this chapter, this was the case even for those who were constructed as the ‘deserving refugee’ during the 2015–2016‘refugee crisis’. Where one ought to stop and where not, which step to take and towards which direction, moving from and around the Greek border islands, is indeed like tiptoeing across a minefield in which matters of life and death are at stake. At any moment, if one takes the wrong step or turn, the mine can explode. At times I, also, felt this. Every step that you take and every question that you answer or refuse to answer in the hotspot minefield, can turn your mind into a minefield ready to explode. How many times, did I hear people who are contained at the hotspots, claim that they feel that their minds are bombs ready to explode. The hotspot creates a regime of terror out of all of us, as we fear ourselves and each other. Thus, I have repeatedly asked myself: What becomes the trigger and when and where does the bomb explode? How to avoid the trigger?

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What if the trigger becomes a person or something one does, or doesn’t do; says or doesn’t say? What if my own words or silence become the trigger? Is this the beginning of self-censorship, and even self-denial? What if I become the trigger?

In October 2016, I returned to the UK to my university in London. The idea was that I would take a break from the ‘field’, and I would focus on my Ph.D. studies, do some teaching, participate in seminars and present in conferences. All of which I did. People told me this would be good for me, that I needed to distance myself from Lesvos, from Greece, as I had become too emotionally involved in the ‘field’; that I had lost control. –Will you return? He asked me. I thought you were a researcher and that researchers always return. –No, I am not a researcher. Not anymore. I responded. –But you are a woman, right? And women always return. (Dialogue titled “No, I am not a researcher” that I constructed based on my conversations with Ege in Athens in 2016–2017 and notes from my diary, 3th of November 2016, London).

References Apostolova, Raia. (2016). The Real Appearance of the Economic/Political Binary: Claiming Asylum in Bulgaria. Intersections: East European Journal of Society and Politics, 2(4): 33–50. Carastathis, Anna. (2018a). Nesting Crises. Women’s Studies International Forum, 68: 142–148. Carastathis, Anna. (2018b). The Atmosphericity of Violence Under Conditions of Intersecting Crises by Anna Carastathis. Feministiqa, 1: 6–15. De Genova, Nicholas. (2016). The European Question: Migration, Race, and Postcoloniality in Europe. Social Text, 34(3): 75–102. European Commission. (2015). A European Agenda on Migration. Brussels, 13 May. https://ec.europa.eu/anti-trafficking/sites/antitrafficking/ files/communication_on_the_european_agenda_on_migration_en.pdf.

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Jones, R., Johnson, C., Brown, W., Popescu, G., Pallister-Wilkins, P., Mountz, A., & Gilbert, E. (2017). Interventions on the State of Sovereignty at the Border. Political Geography, 59(1): 1–10. Parwana, A. (2020). Letters from Moria. Welcome 2 Lesvos. April 7, 2020. http://lesvos.w2eu.net/2020/04/07/pixi-letters-from-moria/#:~:text=Par wana’s%20%E2%80%9CLetters%20from%20Moria%E2%80%9D%20are,in%20e ach%20of%20her%20letters. RSA (2022). The State of the Border Procedure on the Greek Islands. 11 October 2022. https://rsaegean.org/en/border-procedure-greek-islands/. Spathopoulou, Aila, and Carastathis, A. (2020). Hotspots of Resistance in a Bordered Reality. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 38(6): 1067–1083. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775820906167. Spathopoulou, A., Carastathis, A., and Tsilimpounidi, M. (2020). ‘Vulnerable Refugees’ and ‘Voluntary Deportations’: Performing the Hotspot, Embodying Its Violence. Geopolitics: 210–232. Stierl, M. (2017). Excessive Migration Excessive Governance: Border Entanglements in Greek EU-rope, Forthcoming. In de Genova, Nicholas (eds.), The Borders of ‘Europe’: Autonomy of Migration Tactics of Bordering. Duke University Press. Tazzioli, Martina. (2017). The Government of Migrant Mobs: Temporary Divisible Multiplicities in Border Zones. European Journal of Social Theory. Tazzioli, M., Garelli, G., & De Genova, N. (2018). Autonomy of Asylum?: The Autonomy of Migration undoing the Refugee Crisis Script. South Atlantic Quarterly, 117(2): 239–265.

CHAPTER 7

Embodying the Hotspot

Where are the Women/Where am I? Where are all the women of the ‘refugee crisis’? a lawyer friend asked me in the summer of 2017 and who observed that most of the people who were arriving at her office for legal support were migrants who identified as men. Her question, forced me to pause for a moment and to turn to my work and ask myself: indeed, where are the women from the ‘refugee crisis’, why are they absent from my research? Why am I relating to so many people who identified as men? My collaborators and friends Anna and Myrto from FAC, moreover, helped me to reflect on the following: What was happening to the women, the women that are arriving on their own or who decided to remain on their own after their arrival. Are the women only to be found in the images of women with babies and children in their arms alongside their men, performing their role as the mothers and wives within the ‘deserving refugee family’? What about the experiences and stories of women who chose not to be wives and mothers, who left their country for this reason; what about the women who don’t love a man, but, nevertheless, during their journey and while waiting in a hotspot, are exposed to multiple patriarchal gazes, as Parwana Amiri (2020) has pointed out to us, including those belonging to the police? And what about these women who refused to perform their role ascribed to them not only by the ‘refugee crisis’ script but by society as a whole? © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Spathopoulou, Bordering and Governmentality Around the Greek Islands, Mobility & Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08589-5_7

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What happens to women when they refus the gaze, when they refuse the border of gender? It was these same women that were absent from protests, assemblies and squares because they were afraid of the patriarchal gaze, that in many instances, as I discuss in this chapter, coincides with the hotspot gaze that claims to be protecting them as long as they agree to the script that has been constructed along gendered lines. As stated by the former Greek Migration Minister, Yiannis Mouzalas, the state has an “obligation to protect the refugee housekeepers from the economic migrants” (quoted in Bokas 2016). In the following sections, I discuss how protection at the border is being used by the hotspot mechanism as an excuse to enact violence drawing on scripts of gendered violence. At the same time, criminalized populations at the hotspot are forced to go through vulnerability assessments based on medicalized criteria that exclude forms of vulnerability that internment within the camp produces, in order to gain their right to the ferry and depart for the mainland (Spathopoulou et al. 2020). What I came to understand later, however, was how people ended up performing vulnerability beyond the confinement of the actual hotspot and the island and how ‘vulnerability contests’ shaped relationships by forcing people, including myself, to prove to one another who is more vulnerable, who is suffering more, who is the real victim. Before proceeding, I need to acknowledge the fact that I entered the scene of the refugee crisis through the gaze of those who identified as men. And, in turn I was introduced to those who identified as women through the relations that I established with migrant men. At the beginning, my relationships with women in the ‘field’ were mediated by men.

Women Engaged/Encaged I met Ani on the 20th of March 2016 (the day that the EU-Turkey Deal was implemented) through Ege at the Olive Grove outside Moria. Ani like Ege is from Islamabad and identifies as a Baloch. She travelled from Pakistan to Greece together with her fiancé Shad, her older brother Riyad and her younger brother Rubin. They arrived on Lesvos one day after the Deal was implemented, on the 21st of March 2016. Ege and Shad knew each other from their time in Islamabad, and were in contact, while Ani, Shad, Riyad and Rubin were in Turkey and Ege was on Lesvos. They wanted to cross over to Greece and Ege was trying to persuade them to take another route, in order to avoid imprisonment on the island. “Shad

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wants to come, he is not listening to me, I told him not to come, that they would get stuck on Lesvos, but he didn’t listen, he thought that I was lying to them and that I didn’t want them to come. So, they came”, is what Ege told me prior to their arrival towards the end of March. Escaping Through the Protest March 20th, 2016, at the Olive Grove On the very next day after the deal was signed, Ani, Shad, Riyad and Rubin arrived on Lesvos. In what follows, we will see how the hotspot system operates upon this family, by separating them into distinct categories according to their ascribed gender, age and nationality and by, eventually, enforcing them to embark on separate routes and towards distinct directions, even if Ani had told me that it had always been her desire for them to remain together. Ani told me that they decided to depart all together from their city, Islamabad, with the aim to reach Germany, where Shad’s cousins were. Her parents had asked from her that no matter what happens, she should not be separated from her brothers. They belonged to the Baluchi ethnic and political minority in Pakistan, and, thus, they were positive that they would receive asylum in Europe, because according to Ani the situation in Islamabad had become very dangerous for young Baluch. She told me that she was making this journey for her two brothers, who held no future in Pakistan; if they remained, they would either be murdered on the streets by a paramilitary group or end up in jail for the rest of their lives. A few months before leaving Pakistan, Ani was engaged to Shad and decided to join her brothers on their journey to Europe as an engaged and not as a single woman because as she put it to me, her engagement would make her journey much easier. While, still, in Turkey, they had been warned by Ege that the borders had closed and that they would be detained on Lesvos. But Ani and her family had decided that they would try their best to make it to Germany. They crossed over to Lesvos on the 21st of March 2016. On this day, many activists, volunteers, grassroot organizations that until the 18th of March 2016 had been active on Lesvos, together with the people on the move who were detained at Moria hotspot, organized a protest against the EU–Turkey Deal and its deportation regime. The protest, like previous ones, was organized at the Olive Grove outside the hotspot. Several NGOs who decided to stop their activities at the hotspot as soon as the Deal was signed, such as MSF, also, showed up at the

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protest. No Border Kitchen that was active on Tsamakia beach, a few kilometres away from Mytilene port where many Pakistanis had escaped to after the Deal was signed, and that would be evicted in mid-April, was part of the protest. I, also, had just returned on that day to Lesvos with the ferry from Samos. The protest was huge causing a lot of chaos and disruption to the hotspot’s ‘order of things’. As one of the No Borders activists told me, our main purpose is to block the hotspot system and release all these people that have been detained inside since the day that the Deal was signed. We want to cause a confusion and by this hopefully people will manage to escape.

Ani and her family arrived from the shore at the hotspot in the middle of the protest. They were transported from the port to Moria hotspot for their fingerprints to be taken and their intention to apply for asylum to be registered. If they expressed their intention to apply for asylum, they would be detained inside the hotspot, as the hotspot’s gates from one day to the other had been locked, imprisoning inside all those people who were being registered after the 20th of March. If they did not apply for asylum they risked being immediately deported to Turkey. As their goal was to reach Germany, Ani et al. had to avoid entering the hotspot and being fingerprinted. Thanks to the protest, the chaos that it provoked and the fact that the police were occupied with the demonstrating crowd, Ani and her family were able to exit the hotspot through a hole in the fence without having their fingerprints taken. I remember very clearly the intensity of that day, the feeling that although things were moving towards a horrifying direction, there was still hope that things could change and that there was still space and time to resist against the escalating situation. And people were resisting, not just in the form of protests that openly refused what the EU–Turkey Deal was imposing but through various enactments of refusals. Some organizations, as already mentioned, refused to continue being present at the hotspot because they didn’t want to be complicit in what they saw as the EU’s regime of terror on migrants. MSF operated a clinic just outside the military camp site since 2016, when, along with most International Nongovernmental Organisations (INGO) and UNHCR, the day the Deal was signed, it withdrew from Moria and the other hotspot camps

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in protest, as they were turned into detention centres after the implementation of the EU–Turkey Deal. According to the MSF Head of Mission in Greece, [w]e took the extremely difficult decision to end our activities in Moria because continuing to work inside would make us complicit in a system we consider to be both unfair and inhumane … We will not allow our assistance to be instrumentalized for a mass expulsion operation and we refuse to be part of a system that has no regard for the humanitarian or protection needs of asylum seekers and migrants. (Marie Elisabeth Ingres, MSF Head of Mission in Greece, quoted in The Press Project, 2016 in Spathopoulou et al. 2020, pp. 14–15)

Other organizations and volunteers refused to leave the island because they didn’t want to abandon the people on the move in such a dire situation; others like Ani refused to give their fingerprints and apply for asylum on Lesvos. I refused to leave Ege and return to Samos. These silent and less visible refusals formed a particular politics of location that engaged all those people on the island that were resisting the border regime from their specific positionality on the ‘hotspot-island’. As soon as Ani left the hotspot and the protesting Olive Grove, they called Ege who had not joined the protest because during these days, as we saw in Chapter 4, the police were arresting all those migrants that were being racialized as ‘economic migrants’, especially Pakistanis. Ege was afraid of being arrested and detained inside the hotspot. As soon as he received their call, Ege decided that the best thing to do was to take his friends to the house he was renting and where they could hide all together until they figured out what to do next. This was the day that I met up with Ani and her family in a bouncy van of a volunteer friend who drove us to Ege’s house outside Mytilene town. And without realizing it, it was that very same day that I, also, moved in with them. The Cramped House Ege was renting a two-story house near Lesvos’s airport. He had been sharing the house and rent with four volunteers who had been living there but who had left one week earlier to volunteer in Serbia. “What a spacious house”, we all agreed when entering, as the house had many bedrooms, and, hence, I imagined we would have enough personal space.

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It is amazing, however, how space can shrink, when power relations and imbalances dominate a common-shared space. I entered the house, with the idea that even though we were coming from different geographies and were located on uneven terrain, we had ended up together in that house because of our common resistance against borders. This belief was increased by the fact that activists from the No Borders Kitchen would every so often enter the house and use the couch for a night or two. Sometimes there were five of us sleeping in the same room and I would accept this even if I was finding it hard. I felt that I must be open to everything and with everyone: It is all about experience, after all we are no borders activists I told to myself. And, yes, this is also research experience, I reassured myself when waves of stress swept over me at the thought that in order to complete my PhD, I should not be living there, I should be moving on with interviews, I should be reading and writing, I should be going to conferences… At some point I must return to London…. (notes form my diary in April 2016).

As I was moving into Ege’s house with Ani, Shad, Riyad and Rubin, I was desperately in need of a new name, a new self and a new home. We shared this desire with Ege, but it wasn’t long until we disagreed on what our new selves would be and look like. It wasn’t long until the two-story house felt unbearably cramped and the atmosphere suffocating. And I was not the only one who felt this way. During the first days Ani and the three boys were not leaving the house as they did not have any documents, such as an asylum card and were afraid to be noticed by the police. As the days passed though, we would start to exit the house more often, especially with Ege’s volunteer friends. Although things had calmed down a bit compared to the days right after the Deal was signed where all Pakistanis were being arrested and detained inside Moria hotspot, they still had to make sure that the police would not stop them and check whether they had legal documents. But they could not remain inside the house all day. To cope with this situation their sleeping habits were altered. They would stay up all night mainly

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communicating on messenger with their friends back in Pakistan or with those already in Germany, discussing with their family about their next steps, and with the smuggler, as they referred to him, who was insisting that they should leave the island “illegally” for Athens and from there with his help travel to Germany. As the days passed, the family’s linear conception of time was disrupted, as their spatial references would move between Pakistan and Germany, between the past and future, as if the present and the island on which they were located, Lesvos, did not exist. While for me the house had shrunk because I was feeling controlled by other peoples’ experiences, for Ani, as she told me, the house had become a prison in which time had stopped. At the same time, I started to feel uncomfortable that Ani was the one cooking every day for the rest of us and doing all the chores of the house. I remember intervening a couple of times, but Ege told me that this is what Asian women like to do and that I shouldn’t stop her because it is helping her to keep her mind busy and that I was being a racist by telling her she didn’t have to do this. And, so, I feared that a ‘bomb’ would explode if I intervened. The ‘hotspot minefield’ had entered Ege’s house. Everyone was on the edge, and it felt that any small intervention, movement or talk would lead to disaster. There were times that I preferred to whisper my opinion or not to express it at all, to remain silent. The escalating situation was beyond Ani’s control, so many things had been disrupted in our lives, that it provided almost a feeling of security to stick to one’s given role, the role that one was used to. And this concerned all of us. We were all engaging in problematic roles and behaviours, in order to survive in the house. “The refugee crisis is turning us into bad human beings. On this island, we are all turning against ourselves, our values and beliefs”, I remember again Markos’s words telling me at the Olive Grove, a month earlier. Something did not feel right to me in the house. I was not myself at home. My political commitment again borders didn’t make sense when I was giving into so many borders and accepting quite toxic behaviours in around me. Or is this what happens when the political becomes the personal and in order to reconceptualize/relocate the personal as/into the political, one cannot avoid internal contradictions? –What will happen if you refuse to live in the house? –I will be called a racist. And I am not a racist.

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I realized that during this time what I feared most was to be considered a racist. Was I not myself because my real self is racist? (Dialogue with myself titled: “No, I am not a racist!”).

Volunteers were coming to the house and bringing bags of clothes for Ani and the family, most of which they did not even need but it was somehow taken for granted that food and cloths would keep arriving. At which moment did they stop to thank the volunteers who were bringing the items, back then I wondered. And as I wondered this, I felt bad that I expected a thank you, that I was expecting you to thank me.

International volunteers were giving money to Ege who claimed that he needed more cash in order to provide for the ‘family’. And, indeed, it was during this time that I realized that being illegal was costly. We must have made the owner of the nearby minimarket rich, as we preferred to shop from there rather than the supermarket that was cheaper but further away and hence, we risked being stopped by the police So much for the ‘refugee crisis’ destroying the island’s economy!, I thought. I, also, tried to play my role well. To my housemates, I was suddenly the ‘native Greek person’, and it was my responsibility to contact landlords, translate various expectations complaints, speak to lawyers and authorities and deal with the absurd requests from all sides. In this way, the days turned into weeks, and, the weeks into a month that Ani and her family had been hiding in Ege’s house, avoiding entering the hotspot. Everyone was stressed and complaining, and the men started to complain even about Ani’s cooking. Ani started to experience physical pains in her back and allergic reactions on her face. In addition, towards the last days of their hiding period inside the house, small fights started to break out between Ani and her brothers, regarding on how to move forward. Their opinions and desires started to differ. Ani was thinking that it would be better to enter the hotspot and apply for asylum in Greece whereas the boys continued to speak to ‘smugglers’ in order to move on to Germany. Moreover, Ani felt that the boys were not seriously considering their situation: Riyad and Rubin don’t understand that we are refugees now. We need to watch our money, we can’t spend so much on food and drinks, we are refugees in Europe, we are not tourists on an island. They are just happy to be away

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from Pakistan, but I feel a prisoner of this house.” 1 (Personal Conversation with Ani, April 20th 2016, Ege’s house, Lesvos)

Ani experienced their time of hiding, both as a waste of time and a waste of their money. In the meantime, Ege had entered the hotspot with a lawyer and managed to obtain the asylum applicant’s card with which he gained the right to the ferry, with an interview scheduled for August 2016 in Athens. Ege within the next days would be moving to Athens to figure out his life in the capital city, which meant that he would no longer be paying the rent of the house. Ani and her family were under pressure to decide fast. Moreover, things were not working out with the ‘smuggler’; he was asking for too much money and the family felt that they could not trust him. They were literally trapped on the island. Ani et al. were drained mentally and financially by hiding in Ege’s house and, thus, decided to go to Moria hotspot, give their fingerprints and apply for asylum. On the 28th of April 2016, Ani told me the following: “I have to go inside the hotspot to escape the madness of this house”. And the following day Ani entered the hotspot. Perhaps, it is on Lesvos where I feel most at home. Since when is my home turned into a prison? Be careful because soon or later you will feel at home in a prison (notes from my diary, April 2016).

At Moria’s Gate The next day (April 29th 2016) we arrived at the gate of Moria hotspot. As we watched Ani and et al. enter, Ege told them the following: “remember to say that you are from occupied Baluchistan, that you are refugees and not Pakistanis”. One of the guards at the entrance, upon hearing this, asked me where they had said they were from. When I replied, occupied Baluchistan, the guard made the following comment: 1 Here, we come across, once again, with the “expenditure as a kind of fetish in the

Bataillean sense”; only, here it was the money that they were receiving from their parents back in Pakistan to move on (they, also, came from an upper middle class family), however, finding themselves stuck and hiding on the island, this expenditure, I argue, functioned as a way to cover up their feelings of discomfort and shame, for not being able to move on.

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“Balochistan first time I am hearing this one. Now they come from all over the place, and I believe they even invent places”. The guard’s comment shows us how Ani et al. with their physical presence ‘troubled’ the hotspot authorities that swiftly attempted to categorize them as soon as they entered ‘inside’. By ‘troubling’ the hotspot, I am referring to the fact that the presence of a Pakistani family at the hotspot on Lesvos, was challenging the hegemonically constructed image of the Pakistani as a single man from a rural area in Pakistan (specifically the region of Lahore), “uneducated” and who has migrated for economic reasons. On the contrary, Ani spoke perfect English and she came from the capital of Islamabad. Her arrival from Pakistan was not something that the hotspot mechanism was accustomed in managing. There had to be something else to her story and reason for migrating to Greece. And where else to search for evidence for this other story, than on her body. Inside the Hotspot: The Potentially Pregnant Woman As soon as Ani et.al entered the hotspot, they were forced to remain in detention for 25 days. After 25 days of being held in detention inside the hotspot, they were able to exit the actual hotspot but not leave the island. In the meantime, they were placed within separate sections inside the hotspot; Ani and Shad in the section for families, while the brothers were transferred to the section for single men. You will see, in no time the girl (referring to Ani) will become pregnant so that they can qualify for the status of the vulnerable subject, and, thus, have more chances of been moved to a camp on the mainland and more chances of gaining asylum in Europe. As soon as they will figure out that families with children are being privileged, you will see she will end up pregnant in the hotspot. But they should understand that as Pakistanis they gain no chance, nowhere in Europe even if they have children. (Personal Conversation with an UNHCR personnel, 5th of May 2016, Lesvos)2

2 This personal conversation was first published in Spathopoulou, A., Carastathis, A., & Tsilimpounidi, M. (2022). ‘Vulnerable refugees’ and ‘voluntary deportations’: Performing the hotspot, embodying its violence. Geopolitics, 27 (4), p. 4.

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This was what a staff of UNHCR told me in relation to Ani, during a conversation that we had outside the hotspot. Here, we see how the presence of a ‘Pakistani woman’ is met with suspicion by the UNHCR who approaches her as the means with which the young ‘Pakistani men’ would attempt to trick the system, that is, to make their asylum claim more valid. “An employee of MSF pointed out to me in Athens how migrants and refugees internalise the category of vulnerability, as they struggle to figure out ways to leave the hotspot – adopting it as an embodied identity” (Spathopoulou et al. 2020, p. 19). They end up focusing exclusively on how to produce an evident sign that will prove that they are vulnerable. They end up constructing themselves exclusively as victims as they try to emphasise even on a daily basis certain aspects of their condition over others, just in order to gain better accommodation, or a ticket for the ferry. And this has a huge effect on how they construct their personality. That is, they begin to think they are not acting normally, they come to us, for example, and tell us that they cannot sleep at night, that they are going crazy, when this is totally normal [given] what they are experiencing inside Moria – if we were stuck at Moria we would do the same. They end up pathologising their condition by approaching it along the lines of medication and not as a political condition. In relation to this, similarly, one should question the rise in the last months of pregnant women in Moria. In June 2018 there were 975 pregnant women. They, obviously, on purpose become pregnant in order to be considered and treated as vulnerable subjects. (Personal communication with MSF employee, Athens, September 2018)3

This resonates with how Ani was perceived upon arrival at the hotspot. Ani constructed as a Pakistani woman who was accompanying her fiancé, was perceived as the means through which Shad would trick the system into granting him asylum by being classified as vulnerable refugees, rather than economic migrants. Miriam, a young Moroccan woman whom I met on Samos island, related that, as she was on a boat crossing from Turkey to Samos, a fellow passenger offered to act as her husband, to make her pregnant, in the hope that they would be released more quickly from the hotspot. The hotspot system, in other words, does not only control one’s 3 This personal communication was first published in Spathopoulou, A., Carastathis, A., & Tsilimpounidi, M. (2022). ‘Vulnerable refugees’ and ‘voluntary deportations’: Performing the hotspot, embodying its violence. Geopolitics, 27 (4), p. 19.

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(im)mobility but also affects one’s relationship to one’s own body, as well as how they relate to each other even prior to their arrival on the hotspot island, or after their departure. Ani and her family were becoming aware of the fact that they would not get asylum, at least not on Lesvos. They understood this while waiting inside the hotspot. even if we are a family, they treat us as if we are not together, as if we are not a family, as if we are not refugees, like the Syrians and Iraqis. They just ignore Afghanis and Pakistanis. UNHCR doesn’t even bother about us. NGOs don’t take care of us. We still haven’t received a number for asylum interview. They think that we do not need asylum, that we are economic migrants that need work. And for this they are deporting Pakistanis. (Personal Conversation with Ani via WhatsApp, May 2016)

This was what Ani told me, during many conversations that we had via WhatsApp while they were inside the hotspot. At the same time, sixteenyear-old Rubin was refusing to be separated from his family. If he revealed his real age, he would be identified as a minor, and, therefore, be placed within a separate closed section within the hotspot for unaccompanied minors (on the pretext of protection) and channelled through a different procedure than the rest of his family. In his case he would be placed in an accommodation for unaccompanied minors, first on the island and then on the mainland, and would have the right to remain in Greece until he turned eighteen years old. In order to do this, however, he would have to claim that he arrived alone in Greece, that he is, in other words, unaccompanied, without a family. Rubin, however, did not want to use the ‘minor’s card’ to become legal in Greece. He wanted to remain with his family and move on with them to Germany, even if this meant continuing to travel illegally. He preferred illegality than being legal and alone in Greece. Ani and her family had been inside Moria for three months without being able to apply for asylum. The months following the implementation of the EU–Turkey Deal, Pakistanis along with all those nationalities that are labelled as economic migrants, were not able to receive the asylum application number, because during that time, priority was given to Syrians and Iraqis (those who were considered refugees), even when they had arrived on a later date than many Pakistanis. Ani during her

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time in Moria witnessed several protests organized by Pakistanis and other nationalities who were demanding their right to apply for asylum. We see here how the hotspot mechanism does not only distinguish between those who will be granted asylum from those whose applications will be rejected; but, prior to this, it distinguishes between those who are granted the opportunity to apply for asylum from those who are denied this opportunity. Ani did not feel safe in Moria because of the tensions and fights inside the hotspot and knowing that at any time they could be deported. Indeed, during this time, several Pakistanis had been deported to Turkey. She understood that in Moria they were waiting to be deported and that they would never be able to apply for asylum. And she was not prepared to go back to Pakistan, at least not yet. The family hoped that things in Germany would be better. And since they were not eligible for the relocation program, travelling to Germany ‘illegally’ was the only way out of Greece. They finally managed to escape the ‘hotspot island’ and arrive in Athens at the beginning of July 2016. But the hotspot followed Ani to Athens as it was inscribed on her body in gendered and racialized ways. And, thus, for her to survive its violence she turned towards and against her own self and body. The border, you told me, brings out the best and the worst in us. –Do we get to choose who we want to be at the border? I ask. –It is not a matter of choice, you respond. But a matter of survival. (Dialogue from my diary titled: “In control” April, 2017 based on real dialogues that took place during this time between myself, Ege and Ani)

‘Floating deportation’ Miriam, a young Algerian woman arrived on Samos in March 2017, one year into the implementation of the EU–Turkey Deal. With her asylum application being swiftly rejected at both instances (a first-degree rejection followed by a second-degree rejection to the appeal that she made), she was transferred from the hotspot to the police station on the island where she awaited her deportation to Turkey. In June 2017 she was transported by ferry from Samos to Lesvos in order to be deported via

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Lesvos to Turkey. The hotspot mechanism operates upon lines of connection, routes and passages, such as the ‘deportation, through which people refuse to be removed from the Greek territory or pushed back at sea, and, thus, on many occasions manage to block their actual deportation to Turkey. Since ferries are the main mode of transport among islands and between islands and the mainland, critical attention to the ferry reveals how the trajectories of the differential operations of the hotspot go hand in hand, first, with the fragmentation and reshaping of migratory routes; and, second, with the transformation of the islands into spaces of containment, waiting and administrative torture (Spathopoulou 2016). As Nancy Hiemstra points out, “for those detained, the uncertainty of transfers and eventual deportation feel like ‘chaotic geographies’ and produces a disorder that conceals the multiple interests at work in the immigration enforcement system” (Hiemstra 2013). Very often, refugees are detained on more than one island after their arrival in Greece. That is, they are transferred by ferry from one island to another without knowing the reason why or for how long they will remain on a particular island. This policy of moving refugees around from one island to another can lead to insufficient human rights monitoring, and, thus, putting refugees and migrants at risk of deportation or pushbacks (Alpes et al., 2017). In this sense, we can speak of a geographical manipulation of the law taking place, as ‘asylum seekers’ are being transferred from one island to another. What follows is a discussion on Miriam’s deportation journey from Samos, the island where she arrived on and where her asylum claim was rejected, to Lesvos, from where her deportation to Turkey was scheduled to take place. Miriam could not be deported to Turkey directly from Samos only via Lesvos, Chios or Kos, from where people are directly being deported to the ‘Turkish’ side. Samos and Leros, in other words, partake in the deportation route to Turkey via the other three islands (particularly Lesvos and Chios) which means that the ‘deportable subject’ is subjected to multiple (experiences of) detentions on various islands and ferries, before being deported to Turkey. One such space of detention within the hotspot’s deportation route, is the actual ferry that immobilizes people in floating prison/ detention camp, literally offshore, quasi-extraterritorial space—(Spathopoulou and Carastathis 2020) which nonetheless can potentially become a mobile vehicle of deportation, an act of ‘corporal removal’ (Khosravi 2009, p. 52), as it transports people from one island to another and from the island(s) to Turkey. The ferry materially generates what Carolina Sanchez Boe has called “a ‘floating

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population’ of foreign nationals [who] are subjected to a forced circular migration through prisons, detention centres, and public space” (2018, p. 189). As I have discussed in my previous work, “detention on the ferry is a practice that has been, frequently, applied since the implementation of the hotspot mechanism, and is ultimately, tied to the way the hotspot system functions. Ferries apart from being used as vehicles of transportation of detainees, they are also being used as static spaces on which asylum applicants are being registered and processed, separated and categorized, as was the case with the island of Kos in the summer of 2015 (before the island started to operate as a hotspot). Specifically, a large cruise ship was used as a first reception and identification centre for migrants that simultaneously transferred migrant to Athens. In this way, for about two weeks’ migrants literally could apply for asylum on board. At the same time, ferries have been appropriated by the ministry of migration as a solution to the ‘overcrowding hotspots’” (Spathopoulou and Carastathis, 2020, p. 9). When I was on Lesvos and Chios in January 2017, there were two huge military-ships embarked at islands’ main ports which were functioning as accommodation centres for asylum applicants that were being classified as ‘vulnerable subjects’ and who were waiting for the outcome of their applications. Due to the lack of space at Moria hotspot on Lesvos and Vial hotspot on Chios ‘vulnerable’ people for two months were being placed in these two ferries that, similarly, to the people who were geographically restricted to the islands, these ferries were tied to the deck of the port and remained immobile”. I remember one man from Kurdistan Iraq that January making the following comment; “not normal things are happening on this island. People cannot leave, and ships are not moving. Nothing is as it should be. Human beings that are not free, stop being human. And ships that are not out at sea, are not ships anymore”. Other asylum applicants who were being accommodated in the ships told me that they felt uncomfortable staying and sleeping on the ship. “We are scared that it will suddenly start to move and take us back to Turkey. Every few minutes, each time the boat starts to move a bit because of the waves at the port, I wake up, and think, ok, this is it, now we are moving”, was what a woman from Syria on Chios told me. While other asylum applicants refused to be placed within the ships, because they were scared that if they did not remain at the hotspot’s centre at Moria (on Lesvos), they would miss their asylum interview, or something would happen in relation to their case that they

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would never find out because of being “abandoned on the ship”. “Ships immobilize people in floating prisons/ detention camps, literally offshore, quasi-extraterritorial spaces – which nonetheless can potentially become mobile vehicles of deportation” (ibid.). In this section, I follow William Walters’ suggestion to move from Agamben’s analysis of the camp in order to speak of the brig: “the manner in which a prison or holding area can materialize within a ship, but other vehicles as well” (Walters 2015b, p. 4). I draw attention to the embodied experience of ‘corporal removal” by ferry and the ways in which border and gendered violence interact within practices of deportation. Thus, I argue, refusing to have one’s body touched, grabbed, humiliated, pushed, controlled and removed by those in power, consists, also, of a struggle against gendered violence, independently of whether the ‘deportee’ identifies as a man or a woman. On the Ferry from Samos to Lesvos: Embodying the Violence Here I proceed with Miriam’s description of her journey on ferry from Samos to Lesvos that she narrated to me when we met later, in July 2017, on Lesvos, once she was released from detention at the police station. What follows is her narrative based on extensive notes I wrote down from our conversation, immediately, after our meeting in Mytilene town, as well as narratives from other people who have been criminalized and forcefully transferred by ferry between the islands and island-mainland. Very early in the morning the police put handcuffs on me and from the police station (on Samos), they took me in their car to another port. There we waited a bit before boarding the ferry. At that moment I can’t say I was scared, I was so happy to be out from the police station, I felt at least now something is happening, I am moving, after waiting all this time in my cell. Yunus told me that the lawyer said they were taking me to another island, to Lesvos. At that moment I didn’t know that they would put me again into prison, into an even worse prison. I started to realize this when we entered the ferry. As other passengers were entering normally, I was wearing handcuffs and being accompanied by a policeman. When the ferry begun to leave the port, I realized that the handcuffs would remain on my hands. That I was not going to be let free, that I was still a prisoner. Although the ferry was moving it felt like a prison, that I was still in my cell on Samos (…). No, I did not feel the same, as I felt when I was on the small rubber boat coming from Turkey to Samos. On that boat I was really scared. But it felt as if I was escaping

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something, as if I was heading towards my freedom, there was hope. And all of us on that boat were in the same situation and this give me more strength. But this was not in the case of the ferry that I took from Samos to Lesvos. On that ferry I was alone. In fact, it was the loneliest journey I have made until now since I left Algeria. I was not scared that I was going to drown and die but I was afraid that I would never be free again. And on that ferry, I, also, felt ashamed. Ashamed, when the other passengers were looking with curiosity at my handcuffs. I felt as if I had done something wrong, why did they put these handcuffs on me, I was not a criminal.

Detention on the ferry constitutes an example of how “powers of various kinds have been mobilized with regard to roads, seaways, and air routes” (Walters 2015b, p. 4). Detained transportees are subjected to various forms of authority on the ferry, such as the captain of the ferry, or the surveilling gaze of the other passengers, in addition to the police escorting her on board. Since migrants in “floating detention” are often detained on passenger ferry making its regular route, the divisions between visibility/invisibility, intimate/social and the private/political become blurred. Floating detention challenges our idea of detention and its violences as always something static, remote, deprived, isolated and performed in darkness. Here, William Walters’ observation is apposite: “we can only get so far if we qualify mobility by juxtaposing it with immobility and other stillnesses” (2015b, p. 5). Detention can also be experienced as something mobile and out in the public, as a form of captivity occurring within a crowd in motion. In the case of Miriam, she was subjected to various forms of authorities on the ‘detention ferry’, some of which differed from those during her detention at the police station on Samos (the captain of the ferry, the gaze of the other passengers) while others remained the same (the policemen escorting her on board). But what differed from her (static/fixed) detention at the police station were the specific feelings and emotions that this mobile detention, what I refer to as ‘floating detention’ out in the public, entails. In order to understand the ways in which ‘floating detention’ is connected to a particular way of experiencing oneself, of (not) being yourself, as she is exposed to her own condition through the gaze of the others, as she is being moved in handcuffs out in the openness of the sea, I turn to Walters and Luthi notion of cramped space. Walters and Luthi argue that cramped space connects the study of mobilities and politics more thoroughly to themes of affects (Thrift 2008;

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quoted in Walters and Luthi 2016, p. 5). Specifically, they argue the following: By drawing attention to the multiple senses and experiences of discomfort, but also of pain and other sensibilities and affects, we offer a new angle on political struggles in the past and present by thinking beyond the divisions of private and political, intimate and social. (p. 5)

Turning to Miriam’s experience on the ‘deportation ferry’, Miriam spoke of feelings of shame, exposure and pain that are, ultimately, tied, I argue, to what Walters points out as “the particular socio-material features of the vehicle and its milieu” (2017, p. 11), when discussing his case study of the “flight of the deported”. Departing from Miriam’s experience, I would like to bring our attention to the certain affects that ‘floating detention’ has on the body of the deportee, such as feelings of discomfort (also due to the handcuffs), shame and loneliness. These embodied and emotional effects that Miriam experiences, as she is being ferried to Lesvos, reveal how within ‘floating detention’, we can expect situations of cramped spaces to arise. Situations that affect the way one experiences mobility, and, consequently, the sense of one’s own self through one’s own movement. The handcuffs, the police escorting her, but, especially, the presence of the other passengers who were travelling ‘normally’, made her feel uncomfortable, a general uneasiness, that can be compared to the feeling of fear when travelling ‘illegally’ by boat across the Aegean from Turkey. In both journeys, Miriam’s desire was not to be seen and noticed by others. In the case of the ‘passage’ from Turkey to Samos, she did not want to be seen and detected by the coastguards; in the case of the ‘passage’ from Samos to Lesvos, that took place in the early morning, in pure daylight, she did not want to be noticed by the other passengers because she felt ashamed. Here we see how, indeed, the divisions between visibility/invisibility, intimate/social and the private/political become blurred within ‘floating detention’. Moreover, while being detained at the police station, Miriam told me that she did not feel ashamed as she felt on the ferry to Lesvos because on the ferry “other normal passengers were looking with curiosity at my handcuffs”. In other words, she felt awkward on the ferry because under normal circumstances on a regular ferry ride, she should not be wearing handcuffs and escorted by the police. On the contrary, she would be using the ferry as a means of transportation from which she would disembark in

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order to proceed with her daily life, not to enter another prison, what was about to happen once she arrived on Lesvos. While everything else on the ferry appeared normal, its passengers, the captain, the crew, Miriam was alone in her “state of exception”. On the ferry to Lesvos, she wanted to “shrink to become as small as possible”, in order not to be noticed. To disappear”, as she put it to me. Two other people from Pakistan that I had met on Lesvos and who a few weeks later were arrested by the police and transferred to a pre-removal detention centre in Athens, shared with me pictures on what’s up of their ‘floating detention’ on the ferry. In their messages, one of them told me the following: We are happy that at last we are on the ferry and departing from the island. This is an important moment that I want to share with you. Ignore the handcuffs, at least we are moving. Maybe we won’t end up in prison after all, as there are not only refugees on this ferry but also Greeks

Thus, the question that, immediately, arises, is, what kind of subjectivities are being produced through feelings of shame and discomfort by the mere fact of moving on a ferry between and around islands? How are such feelings structured around particular forms of mobility? What makes certain subjects, particularly women, to desire their own invisibility in public spaces, in means of transportation, in workspaces, or even at home, in order to avoid being touched, harassed or shouted at? How many times, do we shrink ourselves in order to escape the patriarchal gaze(s) and even immobilize ourselves because the mere act of moving in the crowd/public is too painful to handle? As he shouted to me and made a scene in the bus that we were travelling on, I wanted to become invisible. I felt ashamed because the other passengers were observing me. The bus was overcrowded, cramped, as all buses are in Istanbul. We were standing, they were no free seats. He continued to speak loudly demanding me to respond. I felt my whole body shrink, my back bent, my head down. The way we were pressed against each other, his gaze and their awareness of what was going on made the atmosphere suffocating. He was in control. If only the bus could stop, the doors would open and the passengers blocking the entrance depart so I could get off the bus and run. This relationship must end. But the bus kept moving.

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(Text titled “The bus that kept moving” based on my personal experience on a bus ride in Istanbul, summer of 2015).

The violence that people on the move experience in situations of transit, as they make their way into ‘Europe’, also, by ferry, leaves them with a trauma that keeps returning and repeats itself even when they have moved on and ‘officially’ are no longer in transit. During one journey that I made from Samos to Athens in December 2015, I was startled at what I saw, as I was making my way to the upper deck of the ferry. Some passengers from Afghanistan, as soon as they boarded the ferry headed directly towards the life rings that were tied at the upper deck and tried to put them on. They did not feel safe on the ferry and, therefore, they turned to the life jackets; so much they had related travelling at sea to an embodied sense of fear and danger. As a person from Iran who noticed me observing the above scene, commented to me, “they know that this ship is safe, but, still, somethings in your life you can never forget and overcome.” As Walters and Luthi ask: what kind of world gives rise to people who travel this way? What kind of society turns such images into ‘news’ (Keenan 2002)”? “What kind of public lends it supports to the policies which produce such situations? (p. 2)

If Miriam’s journey from Samos to Lesvos by ferry disrupts the idea of detention as something static and private, it, also, challenges our assumption of deportation, materializing, exclusively, across national borders. In the case of the Greek hotspots, deportation is, also, experienced as forced transportation from one island to another. I encountered many refugees in Athens, who told me that they did not remain on the island of their arrival but were transferred to and detained on more than one islands. This mobility between the islands, however, provides people, also, with more time and space to refuse their deportation order and to block their actual deportation. While the hotspot mechanism uses both geography and time against people on the move, it is through space and time that people resist and refuse to give up. Moreover, as Alessandra Sciurba has highlighted regarding the Italian case, “although weakened, the rule of law and human rights norms continued to provide migrants, lawyers, jurists and associations with a powerful instrument of resistance” (2017, p. 116). In the case of Lesvos, the Legal Centre Lesvos is doing

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important work within the constraints of the law, to halt asylum seekers’ deportations. Thus, even though, Miriam was handed a deportation order through eligibility criteria based on her nationality as Algerian, she managed to suspend her deportation to Turkey. What Miriam’s spatiotemporal trajectories at the hotspot reveal are the ways in which migrants are alternatively subject to abrupt accelerations and to indefinite wait, as well as to moments in which migrants themselves jam and slow down the logistics of deportation (Vaughan-Williams 2015). Indeed, regarding Miriam’s (im)mobility at the hotspot because she could not be deported directly from Samos to Turkey but was forced to wait on Samos until she could be deported via Lesvos, she managed to block her actual deportation to Turkey, with the support of Karlos who she met at Samos’s hotspot. The border islands are sites of actual and deferred deportations and where relations develop between deportable subjects, between people who have just arrived on the island and more established migrants that refer to the island as their home. No, I will not get Engaged I introduced Karlos in Chapter Two, where we had left him preparing to assist with translation in the division of the ‘mixed flow’. Karlos accepted the police’s request and, in the years that followed, he visited the hotspot at Vathi twice a week to help with translation. And this is how he met Miriam, at the hotspot in Vathi, in the spring of 2017. Karlos had called me that very same day he met her and told me that he wanted to help Miriam to remain in Greece and escape deportation. He told me that he felt responsible for her and that she needed his help. He also told me that he knew from first-hand how it feels to be in prison without having committed a crime. It was as if suddenly Karlos’s life had adopted a new purpose from the day that he began to help Miriam escape deportation. The way in which he dedicated his time to ‘saving’ Miriam was familiar to me; it reminded me of how my life had become meaningful ever since I began to help and how good it feels to ‘be needed’. As soon as Karlos heard from a Kurdish couple at the hotspot that Miriam had been transferred to the police station, he turned to an activist group of lawyers on Samos to appeal against her detention and deportation orders. During this time, he would go and visit Miriam at the police station and bring her clothes, food and anything else that she needed.

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When Miriam was transferred to the police station on Lesvos in order to be deported, the lawyer on Samos passed her file to a legal organization that was active on Lesvos and who eventually managed to release her from detention and defer her deportation. However, she was forced to remain on Lesvos until the decision to her appeal against deportation came out. During this time, I was reflecting on the power dynamics that were developing between Miriam and Karlos and how their emotions for one another were being structured by the hotspot regime. One thing was clear to me: Miriam was in detention, therefore, how much space (and time) did she have to refuse Karlos’s help? But, also, I knew that Karlos was suffering from an intense feeling of loneliness after being in prison for four years and struggling to build his life from zero again on Samos. Karlos had told me many times that he was searching for a partner, that he was tired of being alone and that he was ready to create a family. He thought that Miriam despite her young age, would be the ideal person, as she was “a refugee woman alone in Greece”, as he put it to me. “We come from the same country, speak the same language, share the same culture, and eat the same kind of food”. “But you don’t even know her”, was my response. But he was insisting that it will be good for her to stay with him because he knew how other refugee men behave to single women who migrate alone to Europe. “She is so vulnerable, and people will think badly of her. I will go to Lesvos and ask her to marry me”. But remember: People don’t just match with countries; people don’t just match with each other…

When I met Miriam one month later on Lesvos, she had moved in with two Italian volunteers in the city of Mytilene. She was not planning to stay for much longer on Lesvos but to find a way to leave the island and move forward to France where she was hoping to study architecture. She told me that she felt bad for Karlos and that she had refused to marry him especially because he had helped her so much. “I owe my life to Karlos and I will make sure to return him back all the money that he spent for me but I cannot go and live with him. This is why I left Algeria. Not to end up in a house all day and tied to someone for all my life, as I am tied now to this island. I hate to say it but for me marriage is a prison. Especially with someone that you don’t love. I want to be in control of my own body and dreams even if this means to leave the island illegally”.

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–There are so many pregnant women in Moria! She remarked. –Yes, because you can only board the ferry if you are pregnant. If you have children, if you are a mother or about to become a mother, the lawyer told Miriam. –It is too risky for you to board the ferry on your own. You are such an easy target, Karlos warned Miriam. If you are a woman, you should not wander alone in the city once the sun goes down. My sister told me in London. If you are a ‘migrant woman’ you should not travel alone. Illegality is for men. The police warned her. Women tend to be more patient. They are better at waiting than men. Men are eager to move on as fast as possible. I heard an NGO worker say. You must wait. Wait for the man to come, wait for your belly to swell, wait for the NGO to take you out of the camp and place you in a safe apartment where you can stay until you give birth. The social worker insisted. Wait for the bus to stop. And then exit the bus as a lady. I told myself. Silence. (Various statements, advice and warnings that I heard from various people and myself during my research between 2016–2020 regarding so-called ‘migrant women’ and my own presence at the border and the city).

“Self-harm” Let us return to Ani who we had left in Athens where together with her family she had managed to escape from Moria hotspot and leave Lesvos. In my previous work I have discussed how Ani (previously referred to as Musfi) experienced ‘illegality’ in the ‘migrant metropolis’ (De Genova 2015) of Athens, as a non-white female body (Spathopoulou et al. 2020). With every day that passed in the smuggler’s house, as she referred to him, in the centre of Athens where they were hiding, we showed how Ani’s discomfort within the house grew because of the smuggler’s presence who

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‘secretly’ started to harass her, something that Ani did not want to tell her siblings and her fiancé because she feared that this would result in their homelessness in Athens. Ani, also, felt insecure outside on the streets in the city because of not having any legal documents. In other words, she did not feel safe neither inside the house, or outside in the city because as she put it to me, “in this country there is no place left to hide”. Shad and her siblings, also, felt unsafe on the streets due to their illegality and the racial profiling activities conducted daily by the police. However, they felt safe enough in the small apartments of other Pakistani friends and in the anarchist neighbourhood of Exarchia, which back then (in 2016) was not controlled/patrolled by the police. Ani, on the other hand, was targeted both as a woman inside the house and as a migrant woman on the street, and, thus, was left with no space to breath. Moreover, her sense of time and self was being distorted, as we can discern from her following words in mid-July 2016. My brothers are out all night and sleep all day. Whereas I am awake all day and all night but without moving at all. I fear that each move I take will cause trouble.

Ani’s above words reveal to us the ways in which the hotspot followed her to Athens and show us how (once again) the house in which she was living in, was transformed into a minefield, a ‘hotspot-minefield’. In the case of Ani, we see how she becomes confined within the intersections of racism and patriarchy, as she is being controlled and intimidated both by the men in the house and the men outside on the street, the police. The ways in which gender formed a border between Musfi and her cotravellers, between herself and her fiancé and her brothers, is revealing not only in the uneven experiences of mobility and immobility but also the unevenness in which they experienced space and time. Indeed, while, all of them were hiding in the “smuggler’s” house in downtown Athens, Riyad and Rubin after sunset exited the house to hang out with friends in the anarchist neighbourhood of Exarchia. During the summer of 2016, the two brothers told me that in Exarchia, especially during the evenings, they felt safe and comfortable, as the police did not enter this neighbourhood, especially, around the square. Contrary, however, to her brothers, Ani told me that she did not feel comfortable to hang out in the square, as she was being disturbed by the men refugees that were hanging out there.

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“My brothers and Fahim told me not to sit in the square because I would feel uncomfortable. Although they were other women there, European women, volunteers, I mean, like the ones on Lesvos, and you are also there, the men refugees there will understand that I am not a volunteer, that I am not European, and they once told my brother not to bring me again because they drink and smoke there. But where can I go without papers and alone in this city because I am always left on my own”.4 It is this loneliness, a loneliness, ultimately, tied to being a ‘migrant’ and a ‘woman’ in the city, that made the weight of illegality unbearable. (Spathopoulou et al. 2020, p. 6)

It is at the location of the body, as a ‘location of pain’, where border and gender violence clearly intersect, leading her to reach out to that pain and try to remove herself from the ‘location of pain’ (hooks 1991), I, now, write.

It was during this time, that I noticed that despite it being summer and very hot in Athens, Ani was wearing long sleeves that covered her whole arms. Every so often her gaze turned to her upper left arm and remain fixated there for a few minutes. Sometimes she would even stroke her arm or scratch the above clothing and pull out some of its threads. This would happen, especially, when we talked about the family’s plans, whether they would remain in Greece or leave for Germany. It was a conversation that was clearly stressing Ani and had become a source of conflict within the family as no clear-cut solution appeared in the horizon. Turning to her arm appeared to be her way out, the only way out from the distressing conversation, a way of surviving the conversation and not breaking down. However, it was distressing for me to observe. Indeed, this was, also, the case with me. While it calmed me, my loved ones would get annoyed, worried and sad. Their reactions burdened me. –Stop picking your finger, you will destroy it! –Then I must stop writing. (What I have heard multiple times since my teenage years from people close to me and what I respond to them now). 4 This quote was first published in Spathopoulou, A., Carastathis, A., & Tsilimpounidi, M. (2022). ‘Vulnerable refugees’ and ‘voluntary deportations’: Performing the hotspot, embodying its violence. Geopolitics, 27 (4), p. 6.

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After having remained for two months in Athens, Ani realized that she could not apply for asylum in Athens. Their fingerprints had been taken at Lesvos’s hotspot and if they went to the asylum service in Athens, they would be sent back to Lesvos, as what happened to many of their friends. The memory of Moria haunted Ani and the prospect of being sent back to the hotspot terrified her. At the same time, Ani understood that in other European countries things would not be much different. As she told me in early August 2016, Europe doesn’t want Pakistanis and they will always see us as Pakistanis. Europe only wants Syrians and some Iraqis. Even in Germany I don’t think we will we ever get the refugee status. (Spathopoulou et al. 2020, p. 7)

Stuck (in)between the memory of her past on Lesvos and the future of a hostile Europe, as well as her present situation in the smuggler’s house in Athens, Ani ended up turning to the source from where she was experiencing the pain in order to remove it, that is, her body. At the end of August two months after their arrival in Athens, Musfi ended up doing something that she would never imagine doing, “deport herself”, as she put it to me via a text message on what’s up. Musfi, I argue, ‘selfdeported’ as an attempt to dissociate herself from her own body and treat her body as an object, as something separate from herself that could be removed, or rather had to be removed in order to cease the existential suffering and loneliness that she was subjected to in the urban metropolis of Athens.5 Harmful Agency Together with Anna Carastathis and Myrto Tsilimpounidi we have discussed extensively how the psychic and physical violence through which

5 The above ethnographic account was first published in “’Vulnerable Refugees’ and ‘Voluntary Deportations’: Performing the Hotspot, Embodying its Violence’, 2020 by Aila Spathopoulou, Anna Carastathis and Myrto Tsilimpounidi.

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the will is bent and shaped, leads some illegalized subjects to ‘selfdeportation’ through the IOM’s Assisted Voluntary Return and Reintegration Programme.6 While deportation consists of a corporeal removal, “self-deportation” is an enactment of violence on one’s own body with the assistance of the IOM. Here, I conceptualize ‘self-deportation’ as a form of ‘self-harm’ in bordered contexts, as a turn towards one’s body that ends by removing it through a process in which a clear distinction between having chosen or having no choice is invalid (Heney 2020). Ani never said that she wanted to return to Pakistan. Her exact words in her message to me were: “I want to deport myself because Europe is too hard for refugees”. She never said “I want to return to Pakistan”. Ani, like many other migrants who I met, when referring to IOM’s AVRR program used the word deportation and not return; the intention to return, in other words, was missing in their accounts of their experiences with AVRR. The IOM insists on the ‘voluntariness’ of the migrant’s turn to its AVRR Program by ascribing complete agency and choice to her ‘return’.7 However, in Ani’s own words, she was deporting herself because “my body became my worst enemy” due to her experience of being an illegalized non-white woman in the city of Athens. It is the embodied element of self-deportation, that is, ‘self-deportation’ as an embodied experience that allows me to connect it to the practice of self-harm, which is a clearly embodied practice and experience (Heney

6 For more literature on IOM’s Assisted Voluntary Return and Reintegration program see also: Koser and Kuschminder (2015), Vrabiescu (2021), Webber (2010, 2011), Ashutosh and Mountz (2011). 7 The IOM in Greece, moreover, asks returnees to sign a form discharging the IOM and any other participating agency or government from liability or responsibility in the event of personal injury or death during and/or after return (IOM 2018a, b). The form declares the following:

I hereby, for myself, as well as for my dependents, heirs and estate, release, discharge and agree to hold harmless IOM from any liability or damage caused, directly or indirectly, to me, my child or my family in connection with this authorization. I agree for myself, as well as for my dependents, heirs and estate, that in the event of personal injury or death during and /or after my participation in the IOM project, neither IOM, nor any other participating agency or government can in any way be held liable or responsible.

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2020; Gurung 2018), as the “embodied, messy, bloody and felt aspects of self-injury” point out (Chandler 2010 in Heney, p. 14). Thus, I ask: How is one exercising complete agency when her body has become her worst enemy? How might we conceptualize intentionality within a movement towards one’s own body and self that is harmful, in other words, against oneself, such as ‘self-deportation’? How to enquire into a situation in which the only way of regaining one’s feeling of being in control over one’s body and experiences, is through harming one’s body, which in turn invoke feelings of fear and despair, that is, of not being in control over one’s life? Right after her meeting with the IOM where she informed them on her decision to ‘self-deport’, Ani told me the following: This is the first time an organization actually wants to help us. They seemed to be really happy that we had come to them, they were so friendly and encouraging. They told us that we had made the best decision for our lives and that they would support us to make the best start back in Pakistan. (Spathopoulou et al. 2020, p. 8)

And then she added: “For the first time since we arrived in Greece something seems to be possible. It was the healthiest thing to do”. Her flight back to Pakistan was scheduled for two months later, in order for the IOM to make the arrangements with the Pakistani embassy in Athens, issue her passport and book her flight. During this time of preparation and waiting, Ani was transferred to IOM’s accommodation centre that hosts ‘vulnerable beneficiaries’ of the AVRR Program, as all other ‘self-deportees’ are transferred to pre-removal detention centres. In those months, when I met up with Ani, her initial relief had turned into agony and fear. “I am scared and uncertain about what is happening to me. I know that going back to Pakistan is not good for me, that I am harming myself and my family by returning. But they must understand that this was beyond my control”, was what she told me one morning in late September 2016. It appeared to me that within a matter of weeks the experience of ‘self-deportation’ as an experience in which she was (re)gaining control over her body and life, in other words, a healthy experience, had turned into something harmful that had happened to her and which she did not have control over.

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–Have you regrated it? I was told that with the IOM you have the right to change your mind, if it is harming you. –At the border I have learned that the only way of surviving is for you to harm yourself so that others cannot harm you. (from my conversations with people who were thinking to self-deport via IOM’s AVRR program).

Emphasizing self-harm as relational highlights, Heney (2020) argues, “our awareness that bodies are emplaced, that they exist within complex spatial and interpersonal contexts” (p. 16) Moreover, she contends that In refusing to see self-harm purely as a practice of self-destruction and violence, it might be possible to see it as a practice of survival, a way of continuing to move through spaces and in relation to other bodies despite discomfort or restrictions. This conceptualisation, in which self-harm might simultaneously limit and facilitate movement, highlights the inadequacy of seeing self-harm as either a choice or as an inevitable consequence when in fact it might be a complex intermingling of the two concepts, in contexts of great difficulty in which action becomes both constrained and significant. (ibid.)

While Ani arrived in Greece together with her brothers, unlike the two men who remained without papers for some time in Athens and then moved on ‘illegally’ to Germany, Ani ‘self-deported’ to Pakistan. Through an interrogation of the uneven geographies of illegality, I was interested in how the experience of illegality (of being illegal) affects one’s feeling and understanding of self, leading some illegalized subjects to self-harm and eventually to ‘self-deportation’. During my research I connected with several people who had experienced (intense) border violence and as a result self-harmed, some of which ended up deporting themselves or were considering seriously to do so. It is important, I argue, to reflect on the role that race, gender and legal status play in how people experience and interpret what it means to harm oneself. In this regard, especially, when it comes to people who are being racialized and illegalized as migrants, it is telling what is classified, and, hence pathologized as self-harm, what as misbehaviour and what as an illegal act and where responsibility is laid; that is, how such definitions involve variable attributions of agency, intentionality, choice and freedom, or their lack thereof. In the case of

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Ani’s brothers, while the two men as soon as they arrived in Athens started to smoke weed excessively and other drugs of bad quality in Exarchia but also in the smuggler’s house, resulting in a deterioration of their mental and physical health (violent outbursts, depressions, sudden swifts of moods, loss of weight), these practices tend not to be classified as enactments of self-harm but rather are framed along the lines of migrant-criminality and hence punished, most often with detention and deportation. While in the case of all other drug users, their ‘addiction’ is either seen as a choice and hence criminalized or as an inevitable consequence and hence pathologized (Matte), when it comes to people racialized and illegalized as migrants their ‘addiction’ is inevitably linked to crime; or as I have heard multiple times from various state-authorities but also NGO workers, ‘they are addicted to crime’. The two brothers had to be attentive to the where and when of their weed-related activity, in other words, in which space and at what time it was safer to smoke weed. They had to hide in their basement apartment or in Exarchia square, they had to leave the apartment at night and still watch out, as the city itself had turned into a minefield. In Ani’s case, however, there was no place left to hide, as she put it. By self-harming she was turning to her body both as a space of refuge from the violence that she was experiencing inside the house and in the city, but, also, as the location of her suffering and pain, that is, the source, cause, and recipient of the violence that must disappear. Where to hide when she must hide from her own self? This question brings us back to Miriam who during her ‘floating deportation’ on the ferry was wishing for her own self to shrink, disappear and stop moving. It reminds us of myself on the bus who wanted to shrink and disappear, for the bus to stop so that I could exit and run away from him, the relationship, the crowd. It is such experiences that lead some subjects, like Ani (and me) to turn to their body attempting to materialize their desire to disappear, to remove their body and the pain. It is important to remember here that Ani’s body had been put on the ‘spot’ by the hotspot personnel on Lesvos, when they approached as the means through which her men co-travellers would trick the asylum system. The fact that Ani started to self-harm at Moria hotspot should be understood, I argue, in conjunction with the way in which the hotspot transformed her into an object of ‘migration management’. As Heney (2020) points out “neither engaging with practices of self-harm nor with practices of ‘not-self-harm’ is a decision made in a single instant; both

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practices are contextual and continuous, extending over long periods of time (p. 17). Thus, I ask: How to understand the self-harm exercised by subjects whose bodies have become ‘their worst enemy’ because of being illegalized and seen as female body at the border and in the city? How does Ani survive when she has turned against herself through the practice of self-harm? If “moving between engaging with practices of ‘self-harm’ and practices of ‘not-selfharm’ is a process of re-orientation, of entering into a method of shaping one’s body differently” (Heney 2020)”, how does this become possible when one ends up removing her body through ‘self-deportation’? The practice of ‘self-deportation’ resonates with what Judith Butler speaks of as the figure of a psyche that “turns against itself”, and which offers an alternative to describing power as “internalized.” The Psychic Life of Power (1997) takes the psyche as the source of subjection and more specifically the ‘peculiar turning of a subject against itself’ through which we are said to come to desire the terms of our own subjection (Butler 1997, pp. 18–19). “Accordingly, vulnerability is the core property that Butler assigns to the psychic life of the subject on account of its being dependent on that which by necessity exploits it” (1997, p. 20 in Spathopoulou et al. 2020, p. 10). In the case of the people on the move I understand subjection as a process through which the hotspot fixes and holds bodies and subjects to certain paths and categories that they end up being dependent on for their survival. Spontaneously, I now write: Being dependent on that which by necessity exploits you, this sounds familiar to me. But does this mean that at the border we are continuously exploiting one another? Don’t you understand that your very presence at the border is an act of self-harm. Or as my mother once said, “your research is harming you”.

Bringing together Butler’s analysis of a psyche turning against itself and Heney’s discussion on self-harm as embodiment, as incorporating a “potentially contradictory experience of agency in relation to the movement of the body through space, in which actions might be neither unwanted nor chosen, but rather experienced as practices of survival”

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(p. 16) helps me to grasp what I see as harmful agency evolving at the border, leading some subjects to ask for their own deportation.

Conclusion –Will you marry me. I love you and I need the passport. I need the passport and I love you. I need the passport because I love you. I love you because I need the passport. –I see… So, at the border you chose to love me. (A dialogue titled “Falling in love at the border” that I created based on conversations/confrontations within a personal relationship whose point of reference was the border).

One spring morning in early 2017, together with Ege we went to the KEP, the municipality centre of services for citizens, for him to see whether his AFM tax number that he applied for a month earlier, was issued. As an asylum applicant, he was entitled to apply for this number, and he desperately needed it in order to rent a house. However, in many centres upon seeing the asylum applicant’s card instead of a Greek ID card, the employees caused a fuss. It was a huge effort to convince the person to move on with the procedure and only when I signed a form declaring that I was hosting Ege (and going into unnecessary details on how we met, from where did I know him, and where exactly is he from) did she finally accept to give him a tax number. Although normally the procedure is fast, with the Greek bureaucracy you can never be sure when you will receive an essential document and there are often delays. Unfortunately, this was what happened with Ege and his AFM number. Ege was tired, in general he was “done with everything”, as he told me on our way to KEP. Nothing seemed to be working out for him, (at least this is what he believed), he was still waiting for an answer to his asylum claim, his asylum interview had been postponed multiple times and he was tired of being continuously stopped and checked by the police on the streets of Athens. By 2017, the frenzy of the ‘refugee crisis’

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had withered down, most of the volunteers had moved on and the crisis was forgotten. Ege felt that he had been forgotten. He did not want to continue with volunteering, and he wanted to make money (admittedly in the easiest and fastest way) and was disappointed that he was not receiving as many ‘donations’ from volunteers as before. And since he had arrived in Athens, he started to smoke excessively weed. He was also irritated with me because as he put it, “as a Greek you are not able to get me immediately an AFM number”. At such accusations I felt confused and hurt. I also felt, I should be doing more. On that particular day at the KEP, for the tenth time they told us that his number was still not available. I remember the look that Ege gave me, a look of despair. He spoke back in English to the employee telling her, what am I supposed to do, eat from the garbage? There was silence. Then Ege turned round to me and said please translate what I said. I felt, stuck and frozen but before managing to utter a word, the employee responded in Greek, “this is not our problem”. “What did she say, asked Ege”. Almost automatically, I responded: “It is not my problem”, not quite understanding what I had said, or whether I meant what I said. Ege was holding a plastic cup of a cold espresso coffee in his hand. Upon hearing my words, he threw the coffee over me. A man who was standing close to us, made the following comment: “It deserves you right, this is what happens when you try to help a migrant”. I didn’t know with whom to be angry with. It was all wrong. A few hours later, he apologized for losing control. “I am a refugee, you should understand, he told me”. I wanted to close this chapter with this personal (auto-ethnographic) account because it speaks to the very important and underlying question: Where and how is the violence performed? My aim is not to expose any particular person but to expose violence itself. How to respond to this question when we have all been blinded by the spectacle of violence? How is violence being enacted through harmful and harming translations, as the one that I was asked to engage in? Don’t let him use the ‘refugee card’”, Afea from a grassroot organization supporting refugees in Athens told me. If he uses the ‘refugee card then use the ‘woman card’, let him know how many obstacles you need to overcome as a woman.

But am I a woman? I meant to ask her.

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Ege grabbed on to the ‘refugee card’ multiple times. And, eventually, I did the same with the ‘women card’, both of us engaging in our own “vulnerability contest”. When we feel threatened and, indeed, disempowered we have the need to grab onto any available ‘cards’, that is, categories that become reified as identities and, as means of enacting and legitimizing violence against each other. And we constantly feel threatened and vulnerable at the border. I am a refugee. I have been told that am not in control of who I am and how I act, he told me in March 2017. But as a refugee do you have the right to harm me? I wondered. Look I am harming myself; how can I harm you? He would ask me while hitting his face with his hands. Thus, I ask: Is self-harm the only way to relate to ourselves at the border?

References Alpes, M.J., Tunaboylu, S., & van Liempt, I. (2017). Human Rights Violations by Design: EU-Turkey Statement Prioritises Returns from Greece Over Access to Asylum. Ashutosh, I., and Mountz, A. (2011). Migration Management for the Benefit of Whom? Interrogating the Work of the International Organization for Migration. Citizenship Studies, 15(1): 21–38. Boe, C.S. (2018). Banished Yet Undeported: The Constitution of a “Floating Population” of Deportees Within France. Immigration Policy in the Age of Punishment. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 187–202. Bokas, Christos. (2016). Mouzalas’s Confession: 7 Out of 10 on the Islands Are Now Migrants [in Greek]. Proto Thema, 30 September. https://www.pro tothema.gr/greece/article/615355/omologia-mouzala-7-stous-10-sta-nisiaeinai-pleon-metanastes/. Butler, Judith. (1997). The Psychic Life of Power. New York: Routledge. De Genova, Nicholas. (2015). Border Struggles in the Migrant Metropolis. Nordic Journal of Migration Research, 5(1): 3–10. Gurung, K. (2018). Bodywork: Self-Harm, Trauma, and Embodied Expressions of Pain. Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 17(1): 32–47.

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Heney, V. (2020). Unending and Uncertain: Thinking Through a Phenomenological Consideration of Self-Harm Towards a Feminist Understanding of Embodied Agency. Journal of International Women’s Studies, 21(3): 7–21. Hiemstra, N. (2013). “You Don’t Even Know Where You Are”: Chaotic Geographies of Us Migrant Detention and Deportation. In Moran, D., Gill, N., and Conlon, D. (eds.), Carceral Spaces: Mobility and Agency in Imprisonment and Migrant Detention. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, pp. 57–75. hooks, b. (1991). Theory as Liberatory Practice. Yale Journal of Law & Feminism, 4: 1–12. IOM. (2018a). Assisted Voluntary Return and Reintegration. IOM Website. https://www.iom.int/assisted-voluntary-return-and-reintegration. IOM. (2018b). The Implementation of Assisted Voluntary Returns Including Reintegration Measures (AVRR) June 2016–October 2018b. IOM Greece Newsletter, 18 October 2018b. Khosravi, S. (2009). Sweden: Detention and Deportation of Asylum Seekers. Race & Class, 50(4): 38–56. Koser, Khalid, and Kuschminder, Katie. (2015). Comparative Research on the Assisted Voluntary Return and Reintegration of Migrants. Geneva: International Organisation for Migration. Nayak, Suryia. (2017). Location as Method. Qualitative Research Journal, 17(3): 202–216. Parwana, A. (2020). Letters from Moria. Welcome 2 Lesvos. April 7, 2020. http://lesvos.w2eu.net/2020/04/07/pixi-letters-from-moria/#:~:text=Par wana’s%20%E2%80%9CLetters%20from%20Moria%E2%80%9D%20are,in%20e ach%20of%20her%20letters. Sciurba, Alessandra. (2017). Categorizing Migrants by Undermining the Right to Asylum: The Implementation of the “Hotspot Approach” in Sicily. Etnografia e ricerca Qualitative: 97–120. Spathopoulou, A. (2016). The Ferry as a Mobile Hotspot: Migrants at the Uneasy Borderlands of Greece. Society & Space, 8 November. Accessed at http://societyandspace.org/2016/12/15/the-ferry-as-a-mobile-hotspotmigrants-at-the-uneasy-borderlands-of-greece/, on 5 July 2017. Spathopoulou, A. and Carastathis, A. (2020). Hotspots of Resistance in a Bordered Reality. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 38(6): 1067–1083. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775820906167. Spathopoulou, A., Carastathis, A., and Tsilimpounidi, M. (2020). ‘Vulnerable Refugees’ and ‘Voluntary Deportations’: Performing the Hotspot, Embodying Its Violence. Geopolitics: 210–232. Vaughan-Williams, N. (2015). Europe’s Border Crisis: Biopolitical Security and Beyond. Oxford University Press, USA. Vr˘abiescu, I. (2021). Deporting Europeans: The Racialized Mobility of Romanians in France. Rowman & Littlefield.

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Walters, William. (2015a). Reflections on Migration and Governmentality. Movements. Journal Für kritische Migrations- Und Grenzregimeforschung, 1(1). Walters, William. (2015b). On the Road with Michel Foucault: Migration, Deportation, and Viapolitics. In Fuggle, Sophie, Lanci, Yari, Tazzioli, Martina (eds.), Foucault and the History of Our Present. Houndmills, pp. 94–110. Walters, William, and Lüthi, B. (2016). International Journal of Politics Culture and Society, 29(4): 359–366. Walters, W. (2017). The Microphysics of Power Redux. In Foucault and the Modern International (pp. 57–75). Palgrave Macmillan, New York. Webber, Frances. (2010). The Politics of Voluntary Returns. Institute of Race Relations, 11 November. http://www.irr.org.uk/news/the-politics-of-volunt ary-returns/. Webber, Frances. (2011). How Voluntary Are Voluntary Returns? Race & Class, 52(4): 98–107. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306396810396606.

CHAPTER 8

Returning to the Hotspot

A ferry to nowhere In the final chapter, I turn to peoples’ experiences of the ‘waiting chamber’ (Tsilimpounidi and Walsh 2014) of Athens as we move from the ‘migration crisis’ that was announced by the Greek prime minister in October 2019 to the global Covid-19 pandemic crisis that arrived in Greece in February 2020. In order to understand better what I refer to “as the atmospheric violence of temporariness”, I focus on how transitstay narratives (Spathopoulou and Tazzioli 2021) and the specific policies that relate to them and intensified during the pandemic Covid-19 crisis shape subjectivities, affect peoples’ lives and what it means to be politically and financially engaged in the urban city of Athens. The question that runs through this chapter is the following: How do we relate to each other and to ourselves within a situation of ‘permanent temporariness’? Transit adopts a particular meaning regarding the ‘mobile hotspot’ as it cuts through the socio-political landscape of Athens, producing migrant subjectivities, that, ultimately, concern when, where and for how long, does one count as a ‘migrant’?1 1 We reflected collectively on this question in a workshop lead by Bridget Anderson during the first Feminist No Borders Summer School in 2008. See: https://feministrese arch.org/summer-school/.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Spathopoulou, Bordering and Governmentality Around the Greek Islands, Mobility & Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08589-5_8

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As Ege told me in early December 2017, “on Lesvos I arrived at the refugee crisis, when I arrived in Athens, I found a migrant crisis. On Lesvos, I was a refugee. In Athens I became a migrant”. What is at stake here, I argue, in relation to Ege’s comment, is the way in which the interactions between the various migratory categories (in times of multiple concentric crises) draw upon the ‘island-mainland dialectic’, as well, as reshape it. Indeed, moving from the border to the city, also, is experienced as moving from one crisis into another crisis, that is, of being governed in the name of one crisis versus another one. But how do people survive emotionally and materially as we exit one crisis and enter another, in a continues situation of transit? According to Walters and Luthi, when subjects are stuck in transit, or deprived of rights, held in detention, forced into deportation, we can expect conditions of cramped space to arise, which leads us back to mobility and more specifically its mediation. (p. 6)

Which brings once again to the question: how long are people able to survive in cramped spaces? Martina Tazzioli and Glenda Garelli in their book Tunisia as a Revolutionized Space of Migration, use the term “migrantization” when referring to the Tunisian context; that is, “the different processes of ‘migrantization’ that can be observed there and that point to ‘combined and heterogeneous struggles’ of becoming migrant, being governed as a migrant, and resisting further precarization in migration” (2016, p. 8). Here, I am interested in how transit as a form of governance results in the ‘migrantization’ of people on the move, where I use the term ‘migrantization’ to refer to what I witnessed as the gradual deterioration of peoples’ physical and mental worlds due to the further precarization of their conditions in Athens. It was as if the people that I once knew had disappeared, were missing. In other words, when a person’s stay is being constructed as temporary and her mobility is restricted, I am interested in how this affects the way the person feels and experiences herself in the city and in relation to others who move more comfortably between spaces, exactly because they have the right to remain. It becomes important, therefore, to ask not only what it means to be governed as a migrant but what does it mean to see and feel yourself as a migrant, in other words, as underserving and unworthy of anything that can potentially last, whether, it is a home, a job, security, a relationship, friendship, love. This is what

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a volunteer from Spain told Ege at the Olive Grove on Lesvos in April 2016. The point is not just to get asylum and take the ferry. The thing is what you are going to do with your life from then on, the important thing is to get a life once you get off the ferry. And by life, I mean a job, a house, a relationship. The most difficult part is ahead of you, once you get on the ferry and leave Lesvos. And as I sat next to him, in my own situation of transit, listening to those words, was the first push to avoid organizing my life and instead to focus on fixing his, I realize now.

What happens to people once they leave Lesvos? This is a question, I heard and asked myself and to others around me many times during my stay on Lesvos in 2016, as we observed people embarking on the ferry to Athens, on a boat to nowhere (Anoushka Shankar, song “Boat to nowhere”). What is happening to people in Athens? We boarded together the ferry on that spring evening of April 2016. What happened to us once we departed from Lesvos?

“Things will be better in Athens, on the mainland, more opportunities, more people to help, more people waiting for me and more projects that we can work on together. Together we will beat the borders”, I remember Ege saying. At which point did you start to monitor my steps and my location? Why are you not moving forward? I asked him. It was you, who followed me to Athens. It is you who is stuck in transit. He responded. (notes from my diary, September 2019) Thus, I now ask: What happened to us in Athens?

To Which Organization Do You Belong?

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They told me that I need to go to HELIOS, to the IOM now that I am a refugee. That they will help me to settled down in Athens. But when I went to the HELIO’s centre, they treated me as if I had already made a life in Athens, as if I was not a refugee. (Basel, recognized refugee, Athens, June 2020) Integration, what integration are you talking about. You only need to think that the organization responsible for refugees’ integration is the IOM. And what is the IOM’s main function in Greece? To deport people. (Tayfun, cultural mediator, Athens, October 2020) At HELIOS I felt that they wanted me to leave the country. They were presenting me with so many obstacles. And, finally, I left. (Masoon, Athens, September 2020) Are we dependent on someone else in order to settle down? Or should we make it on my own? I would never reach out to the IOM. Neither do I trust the UNHCR {…} Can I trust you? (from my diary, 6th of July 2020). – Since when was our relationship about cash? I asked him. – Show me another way to make a living, for me to survive in this city, in your city, he responded. (Silence) – There is no other way. And soon or later, it will be you that will tell me I must leave… he concluded. (Dialogue titled: “You must leave” that I created based on my conversations with Ege in Athens in 2018)

As I have argued together with Martina Tazzioli “the discursive shift from a ‘refugee crisis’ towards a ‘migration crisis’ in Greece and how attributed notions of choice and agency play into this shift, can be analyzed by looking at how migration agencies reconfigured their role in the country” (Spathopoulou and Tazzioli 2021, p. 287). In particular, as Tayfun highlights above, it is noticeable that IOM has become in charge of integrating recognized refugees in Greece, within a context that both the Greek personnel working in IOM’s integration program and the refugees perceive as a state of transit. “In 2020, in its response to the Greek Citizens’ Ombudsperson’s opinion on the integration measures for refugees, the Ministry of Migration and Asylum referred to the IOM-run HELIOS program as a scheme which ‘aims at promoting the integration

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of beneficiaries of international protection currently residing in temporary accommodation schemes into the Greek society, by […] supporting beneficiaries towards independent accommodation in apartments rented on their name’.2 According to IOM, HELIOS’s goals are the following: ‘increasing beneficiaries’ prospects towards self-reliance, supporting them in becoming active members of Greek society, and establishing an integration mechanism for beneficiaries of international protection, resulting in a rotation mechanism for the current Greek temporary accommodation system’”.3 We visited one of the IOM-run HELIOS centres in Athens in summer 2020 with Basel, who had received refugee status on Lesvos two months earlier. It was obvious that the transition from ‘asylum seeker on the island’ to ‘refugee on the mainland’ was not smooth. As we have written with Martina Tazzioli (2022) after confirming that Basel was eligible for the program, he faced the first obstacle: he needed a paper to prove that he was residing in an official camp, when he received the positive decision to his asylum claim, in his case that he was residing in Moria. Refugees can enrol in the HELIOS program only if they have been residing in an official camp or have been part of the ESTIA accommodation program.4 Thus, “the system functions only due to refugees’ dependence on humanitarian actors, as only refugees who accept to stay in the accommodation offered by the government or by the UNHCR are entitled to access HELIOS. Those who are outside the official accommodation scheme are considered ‘self-settled’ by the UNHCR and, consequently, as independent and simultaneously undeserving subjects. As we understood during our visit to the HELIOS centre, IOM expects those who exit the ESTIA scheme to have achieved some form of self-reliance and financial integration; for example, in order to enter the HELIOS program, IOM demands that they have an AFM (tax number) and a bank account, in other words, that they have made their way through the system by overcoming the various bureaucratic and technological obstacles and ‘temporal borders’ (Tazzioli 2020) during their time of protracted waiting, being stuck and chronic dependence. However, the questions that the coordinator

2 Hellenic Republic Ministry of Migration and Asylum, “Response.” 3 UN IOM, “Hellenic Integration Support.” 4 Pavanello, “Greece Case Study.”

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at HELIOS asked us, contradicts expectations around refugees’ autonomy”.5 To what organization did you belong to on Lesvos? Who sent you here? And did you depart from Lesvos on your own, he asked. As one struggles to make independently their way through the hotspot minefield, various actors, such as the IOM catch up with the person on the move, get hold of her and offer their ‘assistance’; that is to walk them across the minefield. The minefield is constructed in such a way that only with their guidance and support one can make it across the field or at least this is the impression that they give. I took his hand and we attempted to walk together across the field. Then he asked me: – From which organization are you from? – No, I am not an NGO. I insist. – But then why are you paying my rent? I never asked this from you. So, it is your responsibility to walk me across the field. (Dialogue titled: No, I am not an NGO, that I created based on various conversations that I had with ‘migrants’ in Athens in 2017–2019)

I remember the expression on Basel’s face when the program’s coordinator asked him the following: to which organization do you belong? When Basel told me that he had just arrived in Athens, the coordinator explained to him that he needed to prove he had been residing in an official camp, such as Moria, on Lesvos. “This is crazy. I was living in the hell of Moria, in a torn tent with four other people. To whom shall I write and ask for a confirmation letter? To the Greek government for putting us in such a situation, to UNHCR for not providing me with a shelter even though I am refugee? Can’t they see that I have come from Moria? Why do they always think we are lying?” were questions that the HELIOS coordinator could not answer. And neither could I. The coordinator just shrugged his shoulders and made the following comment: “It is not our job to help you with this. I have told you what documents we need for us to enrol you in HELIOS”. And then he turned to me: “From which organization are you”? “Can’t you help him get the documents?”. 5 This ethnographic account on our visit to the IOM was first published in Aila Spathopoulou & Martina Tazzioli (2021) Turning Refugees into Migrants: Transit, Dependency and Technological Disruptions in the Greek Asylum System, Parallax, 27: 3, p. 288.

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I felt bad and almost embarrassed that I did not belong to an organization. And that I could not help him to register in the HELIOS integration program. But why should I feel this way? Later, that day, the only thing that I could think of was the different reception that we received four summers earlier at IOM’s office in Athens with Ani. Back then, hearing that that we were interested in applying for voluntary return the program’s coordinator appeared to be more than happy to help us. Even though Ani didn’t have a passport, it was not for her to ‘return’ to Pakistan. Thanks to its connection with the Pakistani embassy in Athens, the IOM made sure that Ani received a passport as fast as possible. This was not the case with the HELIOS program. With Basel and with other cases that I observed, they seemed reluctant to help with the complicated bureaucracy that one had to deal with in order to enrol in the program. They made everything seem impossible and difficult. And most importantly, they expected the refugee to overcome all the obstacles in a complicated system and to ‘integrate’ on their own and no longer to depend on an organization. What is telling of how the IOM operates as an organization, however, is how regarding both the AVRR and the HELIOS program, they make sure that as an organization the IOM it is not responsible and accountable for anything that might go wrong or harm the ‘beneficiary’ of the program. Similarly, to how Ani had to sign a document that the IOM was not responsible for any harm that might happen to her during her participation in the AVRR in Athens and once she arrived in Pakistan, the coordinator at HELIOS made it clear that the IOM is not responsible if anything goes wrong with the accommodation that the ‘beneficiary’ is renting, and the IOM is paying for. The IOM was not part of the rental contract and would not act as an intermediary if problems should appear with the landlord. “The beneficiary is on his own because they need to learn how to be independent and not to be dependent on an organization, as they have been until now. As IOM, for a six-month period, we deposit the amount of rent and bills directly into the beneficiary’s bank account and that is it. We just make sure that they are indeed living in the accommodation, but we don’t get involved in the rental and bill payments, they should learn how to pay the rent and bills on time and to be responsible”, was what the coordinator had told me and Basel that day at the HELIOS centre. In other words, their

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narrative goes as following: You do not belong to us, you are independent. I came across with many refugees who for this reason were reluctant to enrol in HELIOS program, exactly because, they had heard of cases where the IOM had delayed their payment/allowance, leaving in this way the refugees to have to deal by themselves with a frustrated landlord and with the threat of being evicted from their house. As one refugee put it to me “in HELIOS we risk ending up homeless”. Or as Basel put it as we walked down the street after exiting HELIOS’ office, “they want a confirmation letter from Moria? Well, they can have me, I am the camp, I am Moria”. The Self-Settled Migrant Asylum seekers that are living independently are being referred to by the UNHCR and local Greek NGOs that are part of the cash and accommodation programs for asylum seekers as ‘self-settled’ asylum seekers. Having departed from the island without permission on her own (as the state and non-governmental actors refer to it) results in the fact that the ‘selfsettled’ migrant6 is not being perceived in the same way as the subject who has left the island with the hotspot authorities’ permission and under the control of the UNHCR, that is, in an organized way, as was the case, for example, with those who were classified as vulnerable asylum seekers. ‘Departing’ or ‘exiting’ the islands is, thus, being used by state and nongovernmental actors as a form of bordering migrants’ everydayness in the places they reach or through which they attempt to pass. Unlike the subject who has been divested of agency through the ascription of vulnerability, the ‘self-settled’ asylum applicant is not deemed as deserving humanitarian care. Neither does she have the same rights as the subject who has left in an ‘organized way’, such as the right to accommodation, the right to the cash assistance program, the right to medical assistance programs run by NGOs. In 2017, the UNHCR explained to me that ‘selfsettled’ asylum seekers are all those asylum applicants who do not reside in a government camp or in apartments run by the UNHCR but have chosen on their own accord where and with whom to live; in the cash 6 After the EU–Turkey Deal of March 2016, those asylum seekers who did not comply with their geographical restriction on the island and left the island without the permission from the authorities, were denied the right to the official accommodation schemes on the mainland.

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assistant program coordinator’s words, “they have seen to themselves and are surviving on their own”. In relation to the UNHCR’s above statement, I understood that these subjects who “are surviving on their own”, are being attributed with the notion of rationality and choice, and, thus, are governed as ‘economic migrants’. As Maximus, a refugee from Iran said to me in April 2018, in Athens, I have sign up myself in all the NGO’s lists for accommodation but so far, I haven’t had any response from nobody. And it has been two years now. And now they are saying that all the camps around Athens are full. In fact, they are only opening up space for the people who are being transferred from the islands, specifically, families, and those who are being classified as vulnerable people. Never for single men, like me. And then, when I applied for the cash assistance at UNHCR, they told me that in order to receive the cash assistance you must be residing in a camp or in one of their apartments.

The fact that in order to receive cash assistance or to enrol in IOM’s HELIOS program, one must ‘belong’ to an organization, shows us how dependency is being conflated with compliance, and thus independency with disobedience. ‘Not belonging to an organization’, even if it was the organization or a camp that rejected one’s wish to move into an NGO-apartment or camp (which happens very often), is received by the authorities as a refusal to comply with the asylum ‘order of things’ and constructed as not being a ‘real refugee’. But what does it mean to belong to an organization? Within the trajectories from a ‘refugee crisis’ to a ‘migration crisis’, from Lesvos to Athens, where does one belong? The ‘self-settled’ asylum applicant is categorized, I argue, as an ‘economic migrant’ along the lines of nationality, gender and compliance. The director of a local Greek NGO that was responsible for renting out UNHCR apartments to vulnerable asylum seekers admitted to me, during an interview that we had in the summer of 2020, that the beneficiaries of the ESTIA II accommodation program are asylum seekers’ whose nationality has a high recognition rate, in other words, who tend to receive the refugee status. As we have pointed out elsewhere, “even if it is not admitted by officials, it seems clear to me that ascriptions of ‘vulnerability’ and its absence are usually based on racialised perceptions of nationality” (Spathopoulou et al. 2020, p. 18). Moreover, as ‘self-settled’ migrants do not play the role of the obedient and passive refugee, their ‘self-settled

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ness’ in the urban centre in Athens, I contend, is being referred to as evidence of the subject’s suspected criminality. In other words, they are being constructed as a ‘potential criminal’, since, in order for them to survive it is assumed that they must be adhering to ‘illegal’ means. This resonates with the previous ministry of migration’s proposal in 2016 to detain all those migrant nationalities with a low recognition rate in closed pre-removal centres, on the pretext that since their asylum claims will be rejected, they will adhere to illegal means in order to move forward. Similarly, belonging to nationality with a low recognition rate implies that they will not be dependent on humanitarian care and consequently that they will end up in destitution and hence susceptible to illegal acts in order to survive in the city. They become constructed, in other words, as a potential criminal. The way in which refugees are being constructed as potential criminals as a result for not ‘belonging to an organization’ or for not receiving housing and cash assistance, is clear in Sara’s story. I met with Sara in August 2021. She was staying with her four young children in an apartment through the ESTIA II accommodation program. Since she obtained the refugee status, she has been receiving multiple orders to leave the apartment, what is being referred to by the Greek ministry of Migration as the ‘ESTIA Exit’ procedure, what is, however, experienced by people as an eviction from their home. In addition, based on the same order her cash assistance had been cut.7 It was interesting how the organization to which she ‘belonged to’ was threatening to take her to court if she did not leave the apartment on the basis that since her cash assistance has been suspended and she doesn’t have a job (something that they learned from interrogating her young children) it means that she can potentially steal or sell the stuff in the apartment that belongs to the organization or sublet the apartment to others in order to make a living. What we see in this example, is how recognized refugees are being represented and constructed as potential criminals by the very fact that they are not entitled anymore to financial and housing assistance. What I refer to here as criminalization through lack of dependency or for no longer being under the control of an organization, which in reality implies the state, as

7 See: https://rsaegean.org/en/evictions-of-recognized-refugees-from-accommodationwill-lead-to-homelessness-and-destitution/.

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all NGOs must be recognized by the state.8 In this way, along with the refugees, the NGOs and grassroot organizations have, also, become state targets, as indicated by the multiplication of obstacles that the obligatory registration has imposed on NGOs in order for them to operate ‘legally’. When I asked Sara whether she was thinking to enrol in the HELIOS program, she told me that she would never reach out to the IOM, as IOM is forcing people to leave, and it is involved in deportations. “In any case”, she told me “I have missed the opportunity to register in HELIOS because I didn’t leave the apartment when they first told me to, so I lost the right to enrol in HELIOS as a kind of punishment”. In other words, by not showing compliance with the organization’s order and given deadline, Sara was punished as a disobedient migrant rather than being offered support as a vulnerable and deserving refugee. Thus, asylum seekers’ paradoxical condition of being governed as a subject in transit while stuck in a country, highlights that the very concept of transit space ‘can be used to describe how migrants’ and refugees’ relations with state actors, state regulations or laws, institutions or other people produce spaces as spaces of temporariness’ (Spathopoulou and Tazzioli 2021, p. 284). Indeed, the ascribed temporariness of asylum seekers’ stay in Greece traps people in a state of suspended mobility and ‘temporary dependency’ through which they are expected to have ‘integrated’ and, ironically, to have gained a certain degree of independence once they have been granted international protection (Spathopoulou and Tazzioli 2021, p. 288). “The temporary fixes to meet social needs (housing, education, cash, etc.) become permanent; that is, they never cease to be temporary, and social needs go unmet” (BRIDGES toolkit, Transit, 7–8) as accommodation and cash support schemes end abruptly, leading refugees into a condition of evictability, destitution and homelessness. The category of the ‘refugee’, therefore, is overflowing with violent temporariness, as the refugees’ future becomes itself a temporal border through the various deadlines around the termination of humanitarian assistance and by the fact that the refugee status can be revoked whenever the EU technocrats in Brussels decide that the crisis in the refugee’s home-country has ended. In this section I discussed the ways in which notions of choice and agency are being used within “migration management” in order to put 8 See: https://rsaegean.org/en/greek-ngo-registry-ecre/ and https://rsaegean.org/ en/registry-of-ngos-working-with-refugees-and-migrants-in-greece-under-scrutiny/.

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forward various violent policies such as the ESTIA Exit procedure and to produce categories based on one’s mobility from the islands to the mainland or how one is living in the city, such as the category of the ‘self-settled’ asylum seeker. These categories constitute variations of the ‘refugee-economic migrant’ binary and only lead to a further categorization and criminalization of the people on the move through which the actual people are missing. Drawing upon Nicholas Thoburn’s discussion on cramped space, in the following two sections, I attempt to respond to his question: what mediators does this politics construct? (2016, p. 380).

Translating Into/Transit: The Cultural Mediator9 Let’s catch up with Nikos who I introduced in Chapter 2 and who in 2015, was hired by a local Greek NGO in Athens as an interpreter, what in the Greek context is referred to as the profession of the ‘cultural intermediator’.10 During the time I spent with Nikos, I begun to realize that it was through his work at the NGO that Nikos (re)discovered himself as a migrant, or, in his own words, as an “economic-migrant”. As Stuart Hall claims to have rediscovered himself as a black subject in Britain “it was a discovery for me, a rediscovery [in Britain] of the Caribbean in new terms … and a rediscovery of the black subject” (Hall and Back 2014, p. 662), Nikos, I argue, as a cultural mediator in/to the “refugee crisis” milieu rediscovered himself as a migrant. Nikos while working as an interpreter for the NGO, is not only translating the problem of the refugee to the doctor, psychiatrist or social worker (of the organization), he is not only dealing with the ‘refugee’ as a problem, a problem, in other words, for the Greek state to govern and manage. He is, also, I contend, translating his own “problem-ness”,

9 I would like to point here that as I was finalizing this book, I came across with Gloria Anzaldúa’s discussions on her rather painful experience as a bilingual person, as a woman who spends time in multiple languages and hence, functions a bridge, a mediator between various languages and cultures. I hope to delve more into Anzaldúa’s work as I continue to enquire into experiences of translation, positionality and mediation in bordered contexts. 10 Discussion on cultural mediation in Europe dates back to the 1980s, whereas in Greece reference to cultural mediation has coincided with the implementation of relevant EU funded projects in Greece in the 1990s and 2000s. These projects tackled racism and xenophobia and promoted the practice of multiculturalism (see Theodosiou et al. 2015, p. 6).

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as he encounters himself as a “problem”, or rather he is rediscovering himself as the “problem” (Du Bois 1897), that, in other words, even if he was born in Greece, he still counts as a migrant in the eyes of the state and the NGO, as he told me. And if, as Nikos pointed out many times to me in relation to his job at the NGO, that the “refugee” is never understood, is never properly heard, her problem never translated correctly to the one who is supposed to be listening, and, thus, the problem remains; then, what Nikos is, also, implying, is that his own ‘problem’ is not heard and continues to remain unresolved. That, for example, he still hasn’t received the Greek citizenship and even worse, the bitter truth that even if he does, he will still count as a ‘migrant’ due to what Fanon terms the epidermal character of race. “That is, if the black colonial learns to speak as well as the white Parisian, then perhaps there can be equal participation in language and its world. Yet, this is impossible because of To be black and speak with perfect diction is still to be black, and therefore marked as special, unique, and surprising” (Drabinski, 2019).11 I am reminded of the following words from a character in Nagar’s “Hungry Translations”: “You can translate my words to them and theirs to me, but if they remain blind to our lives and truths, there can be no dialogue on this unjust terrain” (Nagar 2019, p. 16). In this sense, “migrantization” is also about rediscovering one’s migrant identity, their precarious and uncertain condition within a nation state, in a permanent situation of transit. At the same time, the state capitalizes upon one’s desire to settle down and exit the condition of transit. Indeed, Nikos as a “second generation migrant” must, every five years, renew his residency permit by paying the fee of 750 euros, as well as showing that he is working because without a working contract, the ‘second generation card’ cannot be renewed. It is a permit that is tied, in other words, to his categorization as an ‘economic migrant’. With the advent of the “refugee crisis”, his “migrant background” is being capitalized upon, what prior to the ‘refugee crisis’, was being exploited in the form of cheap labour, in low paid and even unpaid jobs. “With the refugee crisis everyone is talking about racism, who is racist, this is racism, I am not a racist”, Nikos once told me in 2016. According to Nikos, this whole fuss about racism, how it has become fashionable to

11 https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/frantz-fanon/ (Accessed 25 July 2022).

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talk about racism or to try and prove one is not racist, is connected to the whole “refugee crisis” business. It is become a trend, an obsession to prove that one is not racist! Girls hang out with Syrian refugees, volunteers share their flats with refugees, and start to learn Arabic! And refugees also use this discourse. Whenever they don’t get what they want from you, they accuse you of being a racist.12 (Based on a Personal Conversation with Nikos, May 2016, Athens)

Nikos felt, in other words, that to speak about refugees, to be involved in one way or another in the “refugee crisis”, to have “refugee” friends in 2015–2016 had become something ‘trendy’, ‘fashionable’ in Greece. And by ‘refugees’, Nikos is, basically, referring to Syrians, not, as he told me, to “economic migrants”, such as Pakistanis, for example. It was not like this when we came to Greece. I grew up completely differently. I was playing with the Greek children outside on the streets, in the square, our neighbours’ doors were always open, I would sleep at my Greek friends’ house. They accepted me as their equal but there was never any need to talk about it, it was not made into a fuss, you did not question it, it was just how things were. And then the Greek crisis came (economic crisis), and everything changed. With the Greek crisis my Greek friends came closer to me, to my situation and understood me better. The media was against foreigners but at least there was anger and reaction of the left and I felt supported. But the kind of support the refugees are getting now, is not the right support and it is not the kind of support that is going to help them to integrate and become active members of the Greek society. (Narrative based on multiple conversations that I had with Nikos but also with other ‘second generation migrants’ who were working as ‘cultural mediators’, between 2016 and 2019)

In the above narrative, we notice a kind of nostalgia of how things used to be in Greece, how it was to be growing up at a time when (supposedly) there were no crises. In addition, what we, also, discern is 12 However, we can also say that racism has increased since and with the ‘refugee crisis’.

For example, in the case of housing that, for people, like Nikos, it is more difficult to rent a house because landlords prefer to rent to organizations/NGOs that are responsible for the refugees. At the time of this writing, moreover, Nikos’s parents are receiving warnings from their landlord that he will either increase their rent or they should leave in order to rent his apartment to an NGO.

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a nostalgia for a time when to be a “foreigner” was not “made into a fuss” (Nikos’s words), was not an issue, whether a positive or a negative one. What I detect in this nostalgia and ambivalence about the post(Syrian) refugee situation, is that he seems to feel that the new refugees are being condescended to a different kind of racism. Indeed, in the long run this treatment will only reinforce that the ‘real refugees’ have no way to truly ‘integrate’, as we saw in the previous section (again, this could be understood to be, in a sense, a still more insidious kind of racism). Meanwhile, he seems to resent the refugees for not appreciating him and his plight/predicament, perhaps perceiving them to enjoy advantages that he never had and still doesn’t have (which again is not a denial of racism), but, also, he expresses the sense that in the past he was able to be “Greek” in a way, and that somehow now that has been eroded or undermined. Again, it is, perhaps, about a deepening or a transformation of racism in his experience. At the same time, this could easily be about Nikos idealizing a past that never actually existed, his childhood years, the ‘lost years of innocence’. Nikos became, in other words, “spatially and temporally captive, at the margins of a society, itself nostalgic, caught in the etymological trap of the temporal character of the Greek crisis, held in suspension, spatially and temporally captive” (Carastathis et al. 2018, p. 32). From my conversations with Nikos, I understood that for him the notion of the “refugee”, consists of a specific way of thinking that he relates to the condition and state of being a refugee, which stems from how one is being governed.13 Moreover, the ‘refugee’ according to Nikos and many other cultural mediators that I met, does not want to remain in Greece but to depart for Germany because as Nikos told me once, “Germany has colonized their minds”.14 In relation to our first meeting on the ferry, he told me many times that he missed his job on the ferry.

13 As Pedro from Afghanistan (Nikos’s friend who we met in Chapter 2), told me, the refugee arrives in Europe expecting to be helped, that he is owed help and that the state is capitalizing on the refugee’s need for help in the form of EU funds. 14 Nikos could be expressing many Greek citizens’ claim during the financial crisis that Germany has colonized Greece, that Greece has become an internal economic colony of Germany. That, while, Germany is responsible for the ‘Greek crisis’, as a colonizer, at the same time, Germany has turned Greek citizens into economic migrants in Germany and has attracted many refugees to make their way to Europe.

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At least back then we were assisting people to see them leave. They were not stuck here, and we were not stuck with them. They moved on and so could we with our lives. Even if a lot of them were in bad conditions (wet clothes, dirty, hungry and exhausted) they were happy, smiles were on their faces, and you could see the hope in their eyes. Not like now. Now all you can see are depressed and hopeless faces of people who keep telling you that they need to go to Germany, that they want this prescription and that medical report from our doctors, that says that they have a sickness that cannot be cured in Greece, only in Germany. And, of course, we cannot do this, I cannot help them. And then they get angry with me, they tell me that I am a bad translator, that I am lying and that I don’t want them to go to Germany just because, I did not manage to leave; as if I am like them, a refugee, as if I would ever, want to go to Germany. Then I always need to tell that I am not a refugee, that I was born in Greece and not Ethiopia, that my father has been here since the seventies, that I never in my life asked for asylum, that I am an economic migrant and that I never want to leave Greece. (Based on Personal Conversation with Nikos and other cultural mediators, April 2018, Athens) I am not a tourist. I am here to stay. I am not Greek. I am a migrant. Therefore, I am not racist. But then, how come you have the right to stay? (Dialogue from my diary November 2019).

“I am an economic migrant” I would like to finalize this section with Nikos’s claim that he is an ‘economic migrant’, a statement that we have come across with throughout the chapters, in different occasions and by different people. We only need to remember the example at Lesvos’s hotspot, where Pakistanis were refusing to apply for asylum on the grounds that “yes, we are economic migrants”. Nikos’s insistence that he is an economic migrant and not a refugee, has, I argue, many layers to it. People with a socalled ‘migrant background’, like Nikos, in 2015, found themselves at the border(line) of the “double crises”, that is, the financial and refugee crisis, through their mutual exclusion and prototypically. “The prototypical subject of the financial crisis is the Greek citizen, while that of the refugee crisis is the displaced Syrian family who deserve international

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protection” (Carastathis et al. 2018, p. 31). Thus, Nikos (and many other racialized people who I met) by identifying as an economic migrant and not a refugee, a ‘newcomer’, is an attempt to relate to the ongoing experience of thousands of Greek people who due to the financial crisis have become economic migrants. Indeed, during the ‘financial crisis’, Greeks were being perceived and governed as ‘economic migrants’, as they were forced to leave Greece and go to work in other northern European countries and other more prosperous parts of the globe. Whereas those who remained in Greece, according to Nikos, were forced to work in jobs that in the past they would never have imagined doing. Nikos wishes to identify with this kind of ‘Greekness’ since it reflects his own situation, a situation that he has been in, ever since he remembers himself. Nikos, during many occasions, insisted that he and his parents are economic migrants and that contrary to all those people who are currently arriving and applying for asylum, his family never applied for asylum, even though, as he told me, his father had legitimate reasons to do so. “We unlike the people who are coming now, trusted ourselves, our capabilities and our ability to work, not like the refugees who think they need an organization behind their back to help them with everything”, was something that I heard, frequently, from migrants who had arrived prior to the summer of 2015. “I am an economic migrant”, therefore, is a claim of being in control of his body, life and experiences, contrary to the ‘refugee’ whose life is assumed to be dependent on the aid of the NGOs, volunteers and other organizations. The statement “Yes, I am an economic migrant”, forms part of a refusal to be located both at the level of representation and at a very practical level within a continuous situation of transit, a ‘permanent temporariness’. The subjectivity of the ‘economic migrant’ in the case of Nikos implies a form of embodiment of time; he and his parents have been working hard all those years, and, therefore, should have the right to remain in Greece, as deserving ‘economic migrant’.15 Again, Nikos resents the perceived advantages of those who are newly arrived in contrast with the predicament of his parents who have spent so long in a marginalized condition,

15 Similarly, the Greek state turns to its glorified past in order to persuade EU technocrats of its deserving “Europeanness”, its past being the reason for which it belongs to ‘Europe’. While, the ‘refugee crisis’ at the borders of Europe is being used as the bargain chip for Greece to remain in the Schengen Zone, to guarantee its future in the EU, by embodying the solution to the crisis (where the solution takes place).

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in a condition of transit. During my discussions with people racialized as migrants, they would tell me that Greece owed its supposedly booming economy of the pre-crisis years to the cheap migrant labour16 and to the fees that migrants had to pay in order to renew their residence permits. As Amir from Bangladesh told me in May 2018, “we are forced to pay the fee and work because without a job we cannot renew our cards. We need to prove that we work and pay the fee. I don’t understand why we need to, also, pay such a large fee, 150 euros each year when we also work”. Nikos, moreover, told me that his parents had to pay 900 euros each in order to obtain the ten-year residence permit based on a law that permits all those migrants who can prove that they have been living legally for more than ten years in Greece can receive a ten-year residence permit. In this by identifying as an ‘economic migrant’, the subject is attaching himself to the actual base of Greece’s economy, the material base for Greece’s financial solution all those years.17 While migrants like Nikos were being scapegoated as the reason for the economic collapse of the country during the financial crisis, many people with a ‘migrant background’ that I came across with during my research emphasized to me how the ‘refugee’ of 2015 is being used as the ultimate financial solution to the economic crisis, similarly, to how their presence was being used to develop the country’s economy during the ‘pre-economic crisis’ years. Migrants, in other words, experience themselves, both as the embodiment of the so-called crisis’s culprit and the materialization of its declared solution. By focussing, moreover, on migrants who have been living for many years or even born in Athens, who, within the “‘economic crisis’ script”, were being represented as the crisis archetypal culprits par excellence, we see how they approach figure of the ‘refugee’ as a ‘threshold’, through which they (re)discover their migrant identity. These people are, indeed, being pushed to the border of 16 The preparation projects for the Olympic games in Athens in 2004, created hundreds of job positions, mainly, filled by migrants. With the Olympic games of 2004 that were based on the cheap and exploitative workforce provided by undocumented migrants, “Greece at last was judged adequately modern” (“Greece is burning”, Cultural Anthropology Online, April 2016). 17 These migrants, similarly, to Kasper in Chapter 3, who pointed to his actual body in order to prove his deservingness and as the reason to why he should be allowed to leave the island, are, also, referring to the sphere of the ‘economic’, through their very embodiment of it and as the reason for which they should continue to have the right to remain in Greece.

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the double crises that cut through the socio-political landscape of Greece, into a situation of transit both discursively and socio-legally. Continuing my discussion on the figure of the ‘cultural mediator’, in what follows, I show how the temporality of crisis that defines the uncertain parameters of this type of “cultural mediator” work implies a form of embodiment of time. That is, how, one cannot readily imagine an alternative future and that the suspension of the present within crisis also threatens to engulf any chance that the future could be different than the present.

Precarious Translations As Vradis, Papada, Painter and Papoutsi point out “precarity was and, indeed, still is the mode of production apt for a culture of instantaneous consumption: it matches the instantness, as the worker is replaceable as swiftly as the time it takes to consume the product they produced. Similar in its fleetingness, the hotspot logic (and soon enough we will have a name for this too) is the mode of migration governance fit for the age of precarity” (2018, p. 105). If the implementation of the hotspot system on the Greek border islands reveals the transformation of EU migration and border management through the perspective of crisis, it is important to understand how our everydayness (Lefebvre 1974) is being spatially and temporally fragmented through a proliferation of hotspot logics. As the ‘refugee crisis’ feeds into the ‘financial crisis’, indeed, as its solution, our existence is being constructed around an “atmospheric violence of temporariness”. Here, by the “atmospheric violence of temporariness”, I am referring to the fact that throughout my research, I encountered many people in Greece who during the peak of the refugee crisis feared what will happen after the ‘refugee crisis’ is over. This feeling overwhelmed them as they signed short-term working contracts in the ‘refugee crisis’ industry, which, in many cases, are experienced as a relief after years of unemployment. This addresses both ‘Greek’ citizens and long-established migrants living in Greece for many years without citizenship who suddenly discover through their work in the “refugee crisis” to be at the end of the day “economic migrants”. In these situations, therefore, we see how illegalisation/precarity intersect with the labour market. Specifically, through the profession of the ‘cultural mediator’, we understand how people since the

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advent of the ‘refugee crisis’ are being invited to staff the hotspot infrastructure, the NGO infrastructure, and even the military, to enable the state to exploit their linguistic and cultural “capital.” The figure of the “cultural mediator” finds a place within an “emergent economy”, that followed the evocation of a “refugee crisis”, which exploded with spectacular violence in Greece, bringing it to the centre of public attention throughout Europe (Kouvelakis 2018). This “emergent economy” is tied to the idea that Greece, already in a state of “financial crisis”, alone, could not deal with the more recent humanitarian crisis that the “increased influx of refugees” at Greece’s borders brought, the fact that “over 45 000 refugees and migrants were stranded in the country”. An emergency response was deemed necessary; the hotspot approach to solve the border crisis and the European Union Humanitarian Aid (ECHO) to alleviate the humanitarian crisis. In the words of the EU Commission, “in urgent and exceptional circumstances such as the increased influx of refugees in Europe, the European Commission can fund humanitarian aid for people in need within EU territory through the Emergency Support Instrument which was activated for the first time in March 2016” (EC 2018).18 Specifically by 2018, “under the EU Emergency Support Instrument, the Commission has so far allocated e605.3 million for responding to the refugee situation in Greece. This sum has been contracted to the EU’s humanitarian aid partners in Greece such as UN bodies, the Red Cross/Crescent movement and NGOs” (EC 2018). A central vocabulary of this emergency language is, also, the advertisement of job vacancies in the humanitarian sector, one of which is the job position of the cultural mediator. The figure of the cultural mediator, in other words, is being constructed by and around a growing vocabulary of emerging hotspots, as it becomes one of the most important professions of its booming economy. We can observe this in the following article titled “The new boom aid job: Cultural Mediator” that the New Humanitarian: the inside story on emergencies published on its online website in October 2015. It begins with the following words:

18 http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-18-2604_en.htm.

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A by-product of the dramatic rise in the number of migrants and refugees arriving in Europe is soaring demand for a relatively new kind of humanitarian professional: the cultural mediator. As the first point of contact the refugees have on arrival, cultural mediators play a crucial role: translating, informing and generally acting as go-betweens with the local authorities. They advise migrants about their rights and the services available in their new country. They also explain the cultural differences they need to be aware of as they navigate life in a foreign land, all the while relaying vital information back to aid workers. In Italy, in particular, there is increasing demand from humanitarian organisations for people who can act as these “bridges” with migrants and refugees. The UN refugee agency, UNHCR, recently advertised positions in Sicily, and universities in southern Italy have started offering Masters degrees in the field. (IRIN 2015)19

The commentary “a by-product of the sudden rise, the dramatic rise in the number of migrants and refugees arriving in Europe”, is reminiscent of the vocabulary that the EU Commission used to introduce the hotspot approach on the border islands. “Efficiency and rationality had been replaced the institutionalized ‘Greek’ racism exemplified in the era of ‘Xenios Zeus,’ during Greece’s financial crisis, where the Greek state conducted police sweeps of the city centre to identify undocumented persons by racial profiling” (HRW 2013) and from 2019 onwards has returned to do so, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic crisis as we shall see in the final section. “Such ‘primitive’ methods were replaced with a bureaucratic infrastructure that ‘sorts’ people at all stages of their journey and tracks them in perpetuity” (Carastathis et al. 2018, p. 35), also, with the support of the ‘cultural mediator’, who is being called to partake in hotspot’s infrastructure through her translation services. The figure of the cultural mediator, therefore, forms an embodiment of the crisis’s very logic. “What will happen to all you interpreters now the refugee crisis is over?”, asked Vasiliki to Marios in November 2019, during a meeting the three of us had in Exarchia. Vasiliki is one of the coordinators in a local organization in Athens, a partner of the ESTIA accommodation program for asylum applicants and in which Marios was, also, involved as a ‘cultural mediator’.

19 See:

iator.

http://www.irinnews.org/report/102116/new-boom-aid-job-cultural-med

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We will return to the jobs we were doing before the refugees came, all of us know how to work and we have been working for many years in Greece, this is not our first and only job opportunity. I will return to the catering service, Ahmed was working in the fields in Crete, Irine was cleaning houses.

“The question is what you will do once the refugees leave?”, was Marios’s reply to Vasiliki. “That I have not thought of yet”, she replied. In March 2020, this time, just me and Marios were having lunch in the neighbourhood of Kypseli, during which he told me the following; I keep telling the Farsi speaking interpreters not to lay back and feel relaxed now that they have been hired at the ESTIA accommodation program. The job of the interpreter will not last for ever. Once, the refugee crisis ends, or rather once they from above have decided that it has been solved, then there will be no need for interpreters. Plus, it is logical that there is an end date to this profession. Refugees will not be dependent on organizations and translators for ever. Their children are attending Greek schools, they will learn Greek in no time, and, therefore, in a short time, they will be able to translate for their parents, like I did and still do for my own parents.

The figure of the ‘cultural mediator’ entails within it a violent sense of temporariness; they will be needed and, therefore, exist as long as the crisis continues. In addition, short-term working contracts that might not be renewed are part of this “emerging economy” and relate to the uncertainty of whether/when the EU Commission will decide to stop funding the programs that the NGOs’ are currently running for refugees. The fact that, during the time of this writing, the accommodation and cash assistance programs are being passed over by the UNHCR to the Greek state, intensifies this feeling of uncertainty and insecurity. Within this context, in another instance, Nikos told me in March 2018 that. in our work, I see how stressed our social workers, psychologists, nurses, and other Greek staff are, because of the continuous rumours that their contracts will not be renewed, or that this particular program will soon end because EU funding will stop. They are more worried than us the interpreters because they do not trust themselves, they do not believe in their capacity to find another job, outside of the “refugee crisis”. We, on the other hand, can face the reality, we know that we can exist without refugees, organizations, and, crises.

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This feeling of uncertainty and fear that one, can, suddenly, fall back into unemployment, and the same situation as prior to 2015, is crucial to the way the hotspot functions, as a response to the “refuge crisis”. On all sides, the sense of self, security, and capacity to resolve the crisis is being questioned (Tsilimpounidi 2017). In an atmosphere of hotspots, indeed, a suffocating and cramped atmosphere, everyone, albeit in uneven ways, become products of the hotspot. For some the ‘refugee crisis’ along with the hotspot infrastructure comes as a solution to what people have experienced as many years of uncertainty and unemployment, while, for others it means being imprisoned on an island for an unknown period or forced to remain in a camp in order to enter the asylum system. For others who have been living for years in Greece or even born in the country, the ‘refugee crisis’, reminds them that their presence is wanted as long as newcomers arrive and as long as the ‘newcomers’ are classified as potential refugees and deemed as deserving humanitarian care. The fact that, during the time of this writing, accommodation support programs are being suspended and cash assistance is being cut, results in the refugee being homeless and destitute and the cultural mediator unemployed and, therefore, potentially, also, ending up in a situation of illegality, homelessness and destitution. When the crisis is over, it remains unclear whether the cultural mediators will remain; if not illegalized and even deported because of becoming unemployed, they might be forced to leave in any case, like many ‘Greek citizens’ who in the last years have been forced to leave Greece for a better future. “Still, I should feel grateful that after years of unemployment I have finally found a job; especially if you are a migrant in Greece, in a country, that is in economic crisis, where even Greeks can’t find a job and are forced to leave the country”, was something that Nikos told me about many times during our meetings in Athens. Indeed, according to Nikos with the advent of the ‘refugee crisis’, he found himself within better working conditions than his ‘Greek’ childhood friends from the working-class neighbourhood of Patisia where they grew up together. His ‘Greek’ friends are forced to go away to the islands in the high season, his ‘Greek’ friends are working in a 12-h job and are working even at the weekends. Whereas, Nikos’s working conditions, according to his ‘Greek’ friends thanks to ‘refugee crisis’, resemble those of a public servant, with his 9–5 job and his weekends free. “Can’t you get us a job in an NGO? Or can’t they give us a free house and some cash without us having to work? When our parents had to migrate to Germany

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in the 60s, they didn’t get any house or money for free”, were common statements that Nikos was hearing from his friends in the years of 2016– 2018. Nikos’s friends as the heads of Greek families, had become the hegemonically constructed subject of the ‘financial crisis’. With the declaration of a ‘migration crisis’ in October 2019, it is important to ask who has become the protagonist of the ‘migration crisis’? The last time I spoke to Nikos about his translation work in the summer of 2020 he asked me the following: Who is it that I am translating for since all asylum seekers are going to be rejected, now even Syrians are being rejected? I don’t know for who I am translating, I only know that I don’t want to be there to translate when they receive their final rejection.

It has become clear that the subject of the ‘migration crisis’ is missing. They are missing through collective expulsions in the form of pushbacks at sea and from the islands; they are missing because the right to apply for asylum had been suspended for one month on the pretext of a border crisis in February 2020, as their physical presence on the Greek territory does not count; and once again they are missing under the guise of quarantine in remote beaches during the Covid-19 pandemic crisis. Nobody knows when they arrived, where they are and when they were returned. UNHCR doesn’t even know as they are not allowed to enter the quarantine site and register their arrival. There are no mediators, at least not officially recognized ones. They will never be missed. As we move from one ‘crisis’ to another, it is the people that get left behind; it is the people that are missing. Thus, similarly to Nikos, I ask: how to make sense of our work, life, feelings and relationships when the people are missing? Indeed, for whom are we translating? Our translations remain incomplete not only because people were departing from the border and Greece unexpectedly from one day to the other as was the case in 2016–2016 on Lesvos prior to the implementation of the EU–Turkey Deal or are being deported from the border or the city, or are transferred to another island or camp, or because I even left. Translations, are incomplete also and will always remain incomplete because the person was never there; only the stories that we tell ourselves and research to make up for their/our absence. And, hence, I now wonder:

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If the person was never there but only the state category that defines her, for whom am I translating? At KEP you were translating for them not for me, he kept telling me. But I insist: If he was never there, but only the refugee, who am I missing now?

Smoking Weed Do we get to choose at the border who/what we are about to become? Did we have a choice to become something else in Athens? (Questions that I continue to ask myself throughout the process of writing this book)

I met Nikitas in Exarchia square in Athens one evening in July 2018. Nikitas came from Quetta, the capital city of the occupied Baluchistan region in Pakistan. When I met him, he had just arrived in Athens from Lesvos. He told me that he had paid 4000 euros to ‘smugglers’, a price much higher than the ‘regular’ ‘ticket’ for one of the Greek border islands because they had told him that the boat would arrive directly on the Greek mainland. However, they ended up landing on Lesvos where Nikitas stayed for one year and half before managing to board the regular ferry for Athens on his own (his departure was not organized by the state or an organization) and escape the island. As soon as he arrived at Piraeus port in the early morning, a truck had been arranged to take him to another smuggler’s house somewhere in the outskirts of Athens. The following day, he was planning with the help of the smugglers to make his way to Switzerland through the ‘Balkan route’. As he told me, he didn’t want to stay not even for one day in Athens but head straight for the border. But things did not work out as planned. The next morning, the ‘smuggler’ told him that they could not make it for the border because one of his helpers that would receive Nikitas at the Greek Macedonian border had been arrested. He told Nikitas that he would have to wait. A few days later, instead of moving to the border, Nikitas moved to the neighbourhood of Acharnon, at Amerikis square, a neighbourhood that is largely populated by migrant communities, and, thus, is being daily patrolled by the police. Nikitas moved into a basement flat rented by some

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other political refugees from Baluchistan and ended up staying illegally in Athens until the time of this writing. In the same building above from Nikitas, a refugee family from Syria was living in an apartment rented by the UNHCR (through the Greek local organization Praksis), who had been classified at Chios’s hotspot as vulnerable and, thus, deemed to have special accommodation needs. Within the same building in the neighbourhood of Amerikis, the uneven geographies of the hotspot regime through which people on the move are being governed, interesect. While Nikitas was forced to find work in the neighbourhood’s ‘informal economy’ in order to pay his rent, the Syrian family were being ‘taken care’ of by the UNHCR. Moreover, Nikitas, like many of the other racialized bodies of this neighbourhood, was the daily target of the police raids that were stopping and checking single (black) men, asking for their papers, and searching their belongings to see whether they possessed anything ‘illegal’. The Syrian family, on the other hand, as an object of humanitarian management, was receiving the cash card and spending time at the square with their children, awaiting the day that they would receive the refugee status, a day, however, that would mark the termination of their cash assistance and their right to accommodation support, as we saw in the previous section. We met because the border stopped me. Because of an accident, a mistake. What you have in front of you now is just a body, as my mind and soul is on that border I never crossed.

Nikitas, laughingly, told me that day of our first encounter in July 2018. Nikitas’s mind was fixed on the border; the border that he had failed to cross and the border that he was planning to cross in order to escape Athens. Indeed, during his time in Athens, Nikitas ran many times to the border but without succeeding to cross it. Thus, his past and future were narrated along the lines of borders while his present, his everydayness in the city was constructed along internal borders, that is, how to avoid being arrested and detained by the police. Nikitas, in other words, was forced to enter in/to the ‘borderscape’ of Athens and face the multiple obstacles within the city and within himself since due to his illegal status and racialized profile, he was forced to border himself and his existence on the streets. In Nikitas’s words, “it is hard to be an activist when you are illegal in a city. When you are approached as a criminal and all you

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are thinking is how to get papers or escape the city, there is not time and energy left for political work”. This brings us to Shahram Khosravi’s (2010) observation that borders are everywhere when discussing the process of making borders out of people, and that “the unwanted are not just excluded at the border but are themselves ‘forced to be border’” (p. 99). Migrants’ bodies become the border, or, in the case of Nikitas, we can argue that his horizon has become the border, as his political aspirations had shrunk due to a border that was continuously pushing him inwards, both literally into a cramped house and figuratively into himself, as more and more he was shutting himself away from people. “The only thing that we talk about is how to move forward and everyone thinks that they know best. I am not at all interested in this whole refugee thing, so I am avoiding refugees which basically means I am avoiding every human that I know here in Athens. When you are a refugee, you become very selfish”. Nikitas from our very first meeting introduced himself as a political activist, “I am not a refugee but an activist”, he told me. I am only a refugee in the eyes of Europe, but I exist for, for Baluchistan, for free Baluchistan, not to be a refugee in Europe. I am a political activist. I am not a victim of war or somebody who had a good and normal life and then suddenly lost everything because of bombs and then became a refugee in Europe, as he was forced to leave his country. And once the war stops and everything returns back to normal, he will, also, return and, therefore, his refugeness will end, he will stop to be a refugee {…} My life has never been normal. My heart has always been at war because they have never accepted who I am, my language, mother tongue, my rights, my country. My country is in my heart it is not recognized. Therefore, wherever I go I will carry it with me, I am not a refugee who lost his country, because I never had one to lose; and, until Baluchistan becomes independent I will never stop struggling, where ever I am. Baluchi people may be Muslim but they are not like Pakistanis, we are secular, we are open to all religions. In fact, we are communists. In this sense, we are closer to the Kurdish people, we share a common struggle. And, like in Kurdistan, women in Baluchistan share equal rights with men… I am not a refugee, I don’t need the protection of the states of Europe. I am a political activist, you see the difference? What I need is to be able to move and write freely in Europe, I need to enter the universities and make the European left become aware of what is going on in Baluchistan. I don’t need the refugee status, neither a passport but for the UN to intervene in Baluchistan. I want Europe to help Baluchistan not me. Don’t give me

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a passport but just the freedom to write and publish…. (Narrative based on personal conversations with Nikitas, August 2018, Athens)

In the above quote, Nikitas makes a distinction between the refugee and the political activist, himself identifying with the second. Nikitas claims that he does not need humanitarian care because such care will stop him from proceeding with his political project, that is, to engage with the European left, to access European universities, to organize protests in European cities and to speak to journalists, in order to spread word on the Baluchi struggle, since “no journalists can enter occupied Baluchistan”. For Nikitas being visible was part of being political, as “without visibility they are no politics”, he told me. I remember having multiple discussions with Nikitas on this topic, on the connections between visibility and politics and, indeed, what counts as politics and what it means to be political. Nikitas was insisting that his struggle to become legal was a waste of time that was postponing his work as a Baluchi political activist, while I conceptualized his struggle to become legal as a political struggle in itself that I was eager to support. Instead, he drew me into another struggle, the Baluchi struggle. Nikitas experience of wasting time, brings us to Shahram Khosravi’s notion of “stolen time”, where “the term stealing emphasises how deportation”, which can also be said for various forms of detention, such as self-detention, “is part of the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few by dispossessing the migrants of their saved, spent and invested time” (2018, p. 41). Moreover, Nikitas felt that by stealing his time, they were, also, stealing his identity as a Baluch. In the following quotes from my discussion with him in August 2018 and with other Baluchi political activists, we can understand this clearly: I want to fear the police for being a Baluch not for being a refugee. When I meet and talk to people who are not refugees, European people like you, they immediately see me as a refugee and want to help me for being a refugee and not for being a Baluch. And refugees are seen as being passive and not active people, not political. They don’t care about Baluchistan; they only care about refugees. And I see how many refugees are exploiting this.

Moreover, he told me that

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becoming illegal has turned me into a selfish person. All my efforts and energy are put to make me think how to become legal and to find a way out. It has made me a selfish person as I am constantly and only thinking of myself and how to survive in this city. It is keeping me away from the collective cause. If the Pakistani government knew this, they would be very happy.

As a result, he experienced the following: From a political activist, I am living the life of an illegal immigrant. Here all my efforts are directed to how to protect myself, how to avoid being arrested. I am wasting my time. When you are illegal nobody can take you seriously, what you have to say and the life that you have left behind you. Even the volunteers and activists I speak with at Exarchia square, I feel that whenever I tell them about Baluchistan and what is going on there, they don’t believe me, or they don’t believe the reason of why I am telling them this. I feel that they think I am presenting them with a terrible story, in order to get help to receive asylum, to get papers. This is what I mean they don’t take me seriously, they don’t consider me a political activist like themselves. Only because I am illegal, they think that my main goal is to become legal in Europe. But this was not my goal in the past. It has become now though, only in order to be taking seriously, so that Baluchistan does not appear as an excuse, a lie, but a reality {…} Here in Athens I feel, that I am turning against my own self, what I believe in and fight for. (Narrative based on personal conversation with Nikitas, October 2018, Athens)

In August 2018, a group of migrants occupied the building where the local Greek NGO run the UNHCR Greek cash assistance program in Athens. The protesters/occupiers were demanding that all asylum applicants receive the cash card and claimed that all migrants had the right to cash assistance, independently from where they were residing, e.g. officially recognized camp, ESTIA apartments, autonomously (see Tazzioli 2018, 2019). I met up with some migrants who told me that they had received their cash card but when they went to the bank to withdraw money there was no cash. The NGO personnel claimed that these delays were due to a technical fault in the system and that if the protest continued, nobody would be able to receive their cash. The protesters refused to leave the building until all asylum applicants received their cards and their money. During these days that the protest/occupation was being held, I asked Nikitas whether he was planning to join the protest. He told me the following:

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I know that Greece is stealing money from the refugees, that the government is keeping the money in its own pockets instead of giving it to the refugees. And of course, even if little this money would be very helpful to me, I am not here to beg them for it. Neither for asylum. What kind of Baluchi would I be then, if I lose all self-dignity? We have always been a minority but as a minority we refuse to accept the little crumbs that those in power offer us. Here in Greece though it is harder because there is all this refugee issue and when you are forced to hide in your small house, you start to forget what is most important and the only thing that you end up wanting is a stupid paper in order to become a human again.

The loss of identity and a sense of self that is the result of “self-detention” that we encountered, also, in the case of Ani and her experience of being illegal in Athens, brings us back to the concept of ‘cramped space’. Nicholas Thoburn (2016), departing from Kafka’s notion of ‘willed poverty’ points out the following in relation to cramped space: I see it as attempting to evoke a propulsive critical sensibility, where the structural condition of cramped space is associated also with a certain ‘willed poverty’, as, in Kafka’s words, ‘one strives to see [the boundary] before it is there, and often sees this limiting boundary everywhere’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, p. 17; Kafka, cited in ibid.). In this sense, to create one’s own impossibilities is the opposite of selfcreation; rather, it is to expand one’s field of perception to the manifold of global social relations that traverse cramped particularity, one’s perceptivity to the social disruption of the autonomous self, and, it is the same thing, to continually ward off tendencies to identity, to the seductions of self-affirmation. This is the sensibility of cramped political practice, a persistent deferral of subjective plenitude that forces ever-new critical engagement with social relations. Rather than allow the solidification of particular political and cultural routes, forms, and identities, the ‘willed poverty’ of cramped space ever serves to draw thought and practice back into a milieu of contestation, argument, and engagement, forcing thought and practice from within the constraints and impossibilities of social relations. (p. 376)

Athens had become such a space for Nikitas, that is a cramped space, where, as a political minority, he had restricted leeway both for moving and for staying, as well as to hold onto his identity as a Baluch. However, as we have seen in the previous chapters, far from producing a situation of total confinement and blockage it is precisely from within these cramped spaces in which the social disruption of the autonomous self

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takes place that people open up spaces of livability and of movement, as they refuse to succumb to the seductions of self-affirmation, through categories that become reified as identities within hotspots, such as that of the deserving refugee, the vulnerable pregnant woman, the volunteer, the translator. What possibilities beyond self-affirmation as a Baluch and cramped particularity were opening up to Nikitas within the constraints and impossibilities of social relations in Athens? In the meantime, in the spring of 2020 the government announced the Greek state’s success in managing two overlapping crises, the border crisis and the global Covid-19 pandemic crisis. “The consolation … is that today we are no longer a ‘special case’. We are not the ‘black sheep’ of Europe”, Prime Minister Konstantinos Mitsotakis proclaimed. While Nikitas was continuously being impeded from crossing over the Greek land border and move deeper into Europe, on the other side of the border, the Turkish side, refugees were being both pushed to cross over by Recep Tayyip Erdo˘gan and violently blocked at the border by the Greek military. “The ‘state of emergency’ declared by the Greek government in March, suspending asylum processes for newly arriving people for one month, invoking article 78.3 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, was an attempt by the far-right New Democracy government to find international support for its previously devised, and already partially implemented designs to undermine the right to seek asylum in Greece: to detain asylum seekers and undocumented people in ‘closed centres’ (i.e. prisons), accelerate deportations, and criminalize solidarians with people on the move. On 27 February, exploiting the widespread fear of the coronavirus outbreak in Greece, Mitsotakis justified the containment of refugees, conflating them with carriers of the virus” (Carastathis, Spathopoulou and Tsilimpounidi in Kallio et al. 2020, p. 9). “But I have been mostly self-isolating in my house since I arrived in Athens, even before Covid appeared.”, Nikitas told me when I asked him how he was dealing with the pandemic. “The pandemic hasn’t changed my life that much. I have been isolating myself for two years now and I have still not managed to apply for asylum. What social relations and social distancing are you talking about!”. A few months later when I returned to Athens in the summer of 2020 from one of my academic visits to London, I contacted Nikitas who asked me to meet in the evening in Exarchia square. There I encountered someone who appeared to be high, his eyes blood shot red which

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I realized later that evening, was due to the extensive consumption of weed. I remember him telling me the following: Exarchia is an exceptional place, it is not where the real life of this city is going on, and, I cannot spend all my life in one square. What kind of activist, am I? I spend all day and night, just smoking weed in order to kill time. I am not doing anything here{…}It is like how the Pakistani state fills Baluchistan with drugs in order for them not to react to their oppression, similarly the state fills Exarchia with drugs in order for the refugees not to react.

In the above narrative we see how smoking weed is attached to the experience of not being in control over one’s life and as a means through which those in power are seeking control over peoples’ lives by impeding them to react against their oppression. We can argue, moreover, that images of migrants smoking weed and selling drugs in certain neighbourhoods and spaces, is being used by the authorities to reinforce the idea of transit around migrants’ existence in Greece and to govern them as such by evicting them, arresting them and detaining them, along the lines of “they do not want to integrate”. At the same time, I would like to reflect here a little further on what I see as the interrelation between border violence, transit and the consumption of weed. In the following days that I met up with Nikitas, I understood that his main activity like many other people on the move that I encountered in Athens, was to smoke weed in cramped and humid basement flats and outside in ‘exceptional places’ as Nikitas put it where illegal migrants were able to hang out, such as Exarchia square. “You might say that it is not good for me, but it is the only social thing left for me to do in the city. It helps me to connect with people and myself, it helps me to create big ideas and do think politically, it helps me to feel that I am able to be anyone and do anything, that I am nowhere and everywhere. My time becomes meaningful”. On another day, he said the following: “It is something that I can offer to the volunteers, something that they need from me, and I can share with them”. According to Thobourn, “{…} minorities do have a certain agency, or an agency that is adjacent to them—an agency of the mediator. Deleuze writes that critical manoeuvre in cramped space is aided by mediators, which have a catalytic capacity to carry, intensify, and diversify

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the interrogation of cramped conditions. A mediator can be real, imaginary, animate, or inanimate—a person, an object, plants, animals, myths, a certain discourse, an image, a refrain, or a problem (Deleuze 1995, pp. 125–127)”. In relation to the role of the mediator within cramped spaces, what would it mean to conceptualize weed as a mediator for subjects caught within transit? Here my aim is to neither romanticize nor to demonize the practice of smoking weed, nor to ignore the obvious involvement of the police in the drug industry and their intention to keep migrants ‘drugged’ and ‘addicted’ in order to better control them in the urban cities and to keep them calm in detention and pre-removal centres. Nor am I refusing its harmful effects on peoples’ mental and physical health. I have witnessed how many people that were close to me, became difficult/impossible to relate to, exactly excessively smoking weed. Weed also created a border, a distance between myself and the person that I loved and was smoking it, because of me being a non-smoker our experience of time and space and even our perceptions of things was altered. Because of weed we were unable to share the same experiences and what was worst there were times that I felt it was the weed that was speaking and not the person who I was relating to; that the person was missing. But was this not also an effect of being differentially situated in conditions of transit? To connect with him, I told myself, I must also enter a state of transit. Smoking weed helps me to translate better, my words become meaningful, he once told me.

The point that I wish to make here, however, is that similarly to enactments of self-harm that I discussed in the previous chapter, smoking weed, should not exclusively be understood as a practice of habit, addiction and coping. What if instead we approach the practice of smoking weed in bordered contexts, as an act of turning to oneself and recovering oneself through its mediation, in other words, what if weed forms a kind of mediator for groups that find themselves stuck between the slippages of multiple crises, stuck and immobilized in transit? As Sarah Hughes as pointed out “no one can presume to have the ability (or the right) to fully prescribe what resistance might look or feel like for anyone else (nor, indeed, our future selves)” (Hughes 2021, p. 1144). Reflecting on these questions, enables me to come to grips with the fact that the ‘refugee crisis’, was structured, also, around moments of

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smoking weed, drinking alcohol while talking about politics, solidarity, racism and resistance, something that is generally not acknowledged in hegemonic representations and ethnographic accounts on the ‘refugee crisis’ in Greece.20 The smell of weed brings me back to these moments and (sadly) also to many of the relationships that I established during the years of 2015–2020 and the feelings that they provoked, the emotional state that I was in. Whenever I smell weed, that feeling of being stuck in something or with someone overwhelms me. But, also, a feeling of being alive, an aliveness that since 2015, I have never felt again. I, also, smoked weed and drank a lot of alcohol on Lesvos and in Athens in the years of 2015-2020. First to survive the intensity of these moments and then to continue to feel the intensity once these moments were gone.

Analyzing the consumption of weed within the context of borders and transit, that is, as part of being located at the border, in a condition of chronic waiting and permanent temporariness, helps us to reflect further on the issues of choice, agency and vulnerability or the lack thereof and how they are attached to the various figures of migration. The figure of the ‘migrant drug dealer’ is one that is being reproduced at the obscene of the ‘crisis’ and deserves, I argue, further scrutiny when we are enquiring into situations and experiences of borders and transit. In this regard it is important to think how the practice of smoking weed is co-constitutive of situations of ‘permanent temporariness’, in which people feel unable both to remain put and to move forward. This discussion on weed and how it shaped peoples’ lives and experiences as we move from the ‘refugee crisis’ to a ‘migration crisis’ and more recently to the ‘pandemic crisis’, also, weighs on me personally; who and when is one in control of her body, life and experiences and when not and whether this binary is even valid as read from Nikita’s above narratives, tells a lot about what happened to us in Athens…

20 Karen Foster and Dale Spencer (2013) discuss how young drug users in Ottawa, Canada, draw boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable relationships to drugs and alcohol, articulating an important sense of belonging to a superior group of drug users. They argue, that “through this ‘borderwork’, they solidify the bonds they share with the people with whom they smoke cannabis and drink alcohol” (abstract).

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From a Homelessness in/to Detention: The Pandemic Crisis – I loved you as a refugee. Why did you become a migrant? – But why does it matter? Isn’t it the person that you loved? – It does matter, because who am I, now, that you have become a migrant? – Since when are you defined by whom you love? (Dialogue titled “Love in transit” that I created based on various conversations with Ege and with friends close to me who helped me to reflect on the creeping effects of transphobia that poison our society). On the 21 of June 2020, Ege was arrested by the police in the neighbourhood of Exarchia and transferred to the pre-removal detention centre of Amygdaleza in the outskirts of Athens. He remained in detention for 19 months. During this time, he was transferred back and forth between various detention centres because according to the authorities of the detention centre that I spoke to “he was misbehaving”. Four months prior to his arrest and detention, in February 2020, the global Covid-19 pandemic crisis arrived on the scene in Greece. Since the outbreak of the pandemic, the Greek government has been continuously engaging in discriminatory regulations and practices—under the guise of the COVID-19 pandemic—against migrants (See LCL and FAC co-authored report, forthcoming). In June 2020, for example, when Ege was arrested and detained, while citizens were (relatively) free to move since May 4 and Greece opened its borders to international tourists on June 15, the protraction of lockdown for asylum seekers in camps on the hotspot islands and the mainland—was still ongoing (see also ibid). As we have seen throughout the chapters of this book “the logic of quarantine is already at the heart of the hotspot as a technology of the border: the segregation and containment of so-called ‘mixed migration flows’ from citizens and tourists; the separation of potential ‘refugees’ (due protection) from illicit ‘migrants’ (to be detained and deported), which increasingly relies on the medicalised criteria of ‘vulnerability’. Ultimately, the management of the coronavirus crisis – ostensibly the prevention of contagion – has facilitated the naturalisation of containment” (Carastathis et al. 2020, p. 9). “Simultaneously, the coronavirus crisis reveals the dichotomy between ‘open’ and ‘closed’ camps: how easily the camp’s gates from one moment to the other are locked under the pretext of

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a pandemic” (ibid., p. 10). Moreover, the use of detention under the guise of quarantine becomes a practice through which to obstruct people from accessing the asylum services and applying for asylum. This amounts to denying them the right to asylum and, further, exposing them to violent deportations in the form of pushbacks. The above point to the ways in which, through the naturalization of race, pandemic management operates as migration management, which has led to the construction of new borders and the intensification of already existing ones. As Alison Mountz (2020) has pointed out in relation to the seismic acceleration of bordering with the pandemic crisis, the very body becomes an island. For some people, this is how people experienced their bodies, their mobility and their homes, even prior to the pandemic, as we saw in the example of Ani where her body and her home became a ‘location of pain’, as well as Nikitas who was not able to continue with his political activism as a result of ‘self-detention’ in Athens. Additionally, the ‘quarantine ships’ (see Italian Coalition for Civil Liberties and Rights 2020) that were introduced in Greece and in Italy during the pandemic crisis and on which migrants were detained as part of the pandemic management, recalls Miriam’s experience of ‘floating detention’ on the ferry journey from Samos to Lesvos. Ege had been homeless for some time, but it was during the pandemic that he was criminalized for this. Prior to his arrest, Ege had told me quite a few times, that the police in Exarchia were looking for a reason to arrest and detain him. It was not that simple though since he still had an asylum applicant card. They had to find a reason to declare him a threat to the public order. The pandemic crisis provided them with such an opportunity. Since the outbreak of the pandemic there has been an increase in discrimination and racial profiling of asylum seekers on the islands and on the mainland, in the urban cities. In Athens I have come across with many examples of migrants who have been stopped by the police and fined during the lockdowns because they hadn’t sent the obligatory text message with one of the six reasons for having to go out and that everyone had to send to in order to obtain permission from the authorities to exit their house (footnote here?). The people that I knew were fined with 150 euros because they hadn’t sent the SMS message. Three of these people were homeless asylum seekers who didn’t even have a home address to write down in the text message. Another asylum seeker that I knew, even though she was struggling financially, went immediately to the police station to pay the fine because she was scared that if she did

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not pay, it would affect negatively her asylum case. When she arrived at the police station, they told her that the fine was attached to her AFM, her tax number. When she pointed out to them that she did not have an AFM, they sent her away and told her that she should better go and apply for one. Another issue that I came across within Athens was how the geographical restriction for asylum seekers on the hotspot islands overlapped with the covid-travel restrictions that restricted travel outside one’s local authority during the lockdown period for the population in Greece. Basel who I introduced in a previous section, had received the refugee status on Lesvos and, thus, had his geographical restriction lifted and was able to move to Athens in July 2020. In November 2020 during the second lockdown period, he was stopped by the police in Athens and fined with the 150 euros. The reason they give for fining him was that he had disobeyed the travel restriction, since on his international protection card there was Lesvos written down as his permanent address, as he had not yet managed to change it to his current address in Athens. Basel thought that he was being fined because of the EU–Turkey Deal and the geographical restrictions imposed on the five hotspot islands and insisted to the police that he had permission to leave the island and that Athens was where his home was. “So, they are telling me that I should return to Lesvos and that Moria is my home”? he asked me. He was being fined according to the Covid-related geographical restrictions but in practice what difference did it make for racialized populations? The police know that in most cases, the asylum seekers are not able to pay the fines. And most probably, this is not even the authorities’ aim. Rather, it has become obvious that what the police are really interested in, is whether the people that they are stopping, and checking have legal documents, not the Covid permission to be outside, so that in case they don’t have documents they are able to arrest and detain them. It is, also, provides them with the grounds to detain them even if they have an asylum applicant’s card, by declaring them a threat to the public order. I know of cases where people have been fined and then detained on the pretext that they pose a threat to the public order, also, because some of these people rightfully reacted towards being fined by the police and therefore were burdened with the additional criminal conviction of resisting against the authorities. People who have been detained for the reasoning of posing a threat to the public order face indefinite detention

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and it is very hard for any legal advocate to argue for their release. Apparently since Covid there has been an increase with the Attica Foreigners Division Petrou Ralli labeling people as a threat to the public order and thus indefinitely detaining migrants. Covid has provided the ground for the proliferation of such declarations because people are being accused of posing a threat to the public order for not wearing a mask or for being out at a prohibited time while very often it is the police themselves who are not wearing masks. The pandemic management has provided the grounds for turning more individuals into detainable subjects, as it provides the authorities to use interchangeable the three justifications for detaining a person, namely: the risk of absconding (due to not having a permanent address), being a threat to the public order and being a treat to the public health. It was in such context that Ege was stopped by the police. When they asked for his documents in order to give him the fine for not having sent the SMS, he refused to give them his asylum card. He repeatedly told them that he was homeless and that he had nowhere to self-isolate. After beating him up, they handcuffed him and took him to the police station in Exarchia. At the police station when they checked him, they found a cigarette with some weed inside it. Adding all these facts, that is, being on the street without permission during lockdown, resisting the police, possessing a small quantity of weed and not having any proof of address, provided the police with a strong enough reasoning for not releasing him but instead to transfer him to the pre-removal detention centre of Amygdaleza. In a way, we can argue that the authorities use administrative detention as a ‘solution’ to homelessness. When I called the department of returns at Petrou Ralli to let them know that Ege was an asylum seeker and that he had an asylum applicant’s card, they told me that due to his nationality (Pakistani) he would never get asylum and that until he received the rejection to his asylum claim, they had the right to keep him detained because he posed a threat to the public order. “You can hire a lawyer if you like to appeal against his detention. But there is no chance that we will release him. He has not been a well-behaved boy”, were her last words to me. Although in the EU Commission’s definition of detention,21 the non-punitive element is highlighted, the distinction between the stateconstructed figures of the “foreign criminal” and “illegal migrant” 21 The EU Commission defines detention as follows:

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becomes blurred, as state discourses, law and policy, construct the measure of detention as a means of control (Spathopoulou et al., forthcoming). The migrant becomes equated with the criminal as always prone to becoming illegal. As Alison Mountz, Kate Coddington, and Tina Catania observe, “[c]riminalizing migrants invokes a circular rationale that legitimizes detention: migrants might be criminals, necessitating detention; migrants must be criminals, because they are detained” (Mountz et al. 2013, p. 527). Detention is, thus, a form of control that works to discipline deportable subjects (Hasselberg 2014). Since the ‘good detainee’ is constructed as someone who eventually returns–in the best case, of her own accord–Ines Hasselberg points out how her interlocutors in detention perceive and experience detention “as punishment for wanting to stay” (2014, p. 471). Similarly, Bosworth refers to the fact that detained migrants “assert passionately over and over again that, ‘I feel like I’m in prison’, no matter the administrative nature of their confinement” (2019, p. 82). Ege and many others that I me and had been detained in Amygdaleza, insisted that Amygdaleza is even worse than a prison. Even so, it wasn’t seldom, that in relation to Ege, friends of mine made the following remark: “How much worse than being homeless on the street can it be for him? At least now he has a place to sleep without fearing he will be robbed, he doesn’t have to think about his food, as he has meals provided for him and he has some kind of routine”. “But what if he is deported”, I would respond. And then came those words “Well maybe this is the best solution for him. To return to Pakistan. Even if he is released, what is his future in Greece?”. As I am writing, I now, wonder: Did I turn you into a migrant?

1. In the global migration context, non-punitive administrative measure ordered by an administrative or judicial authority(ies) in order to restrict the liberty of a person through confinement so that another procedure may be implemented. 2. In the EU asylum context, confinement (i.e. deprivation of liberty) of an applicant for international protection by an EU Member State within a particular place, where the applicant is deprived of their personal liberty (European Migration Network 2018).

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Indeed, I stopped paying Ege’s rent because I was advised that it was time for him to become independent and to stop being dependent on donations of people who remembered him from Lesvos; that, in fact I was harming him instead of helping him. Since when are our relationships shaped through a ‘migration management’ so that one must keep giving out cash so a loved one, does not end up on the street? So that she will not end up selling drugs? Did I evict you from your house, did I make you destitute, did I turn you into a dealer? Did I harm you? You see I was right. I told you, soon or later, it will be you that will be telling me I should return, he told me, this time from inside detention. Detention Within Detention “They want us all to catch covid and to get rid of us in this way, now that we cannot be deported. They arrested and brought to Amygdaleza so many Pakistanis because it is summer and Mitsotakis wanted to do a skoupa (cleaning up of the city, meaning massive arrests of people without documents) to clean up Athens from migrants before the tourists arrive. Once the tourists leave, they will let us out”, is what Ege told me a few days after he was arrested at the end of June 2020. Indeed, the majority of the detainees inside Amygdaleza are Pakistanis, exactly because, as I have shown, in Greece they are constructed as the ‘economic migrant’ par excellence and hence criminalized. I was thinking of the time when I met Ege on Lesvos, how by performing the role of the ‘refugee volunteer’, he had struggled not to be detained inside Moria hotspot. Five years later, after having appealed twice against the negative decision to his asylum claim, and living on the street in Athens, he was arrested by the police and detained inside a pre-removal centre. During these five years, we have been moving between multiple crises; from a refugee crisis to a migration crisis, from a migration crisis to a border crisis and from the border crisis to the global Covid-19 pandemic crisis. As we moved from Lesvos to Athens, from the border to the city, we departed from one crisis’s scene only to enter another. There were times that we found ourselves within double crisis, or what Anna Carastathis (2018) has analyzed as a ‘crisis within a crisis’, when speaking of how in 2015 the ‘refugee crisis’ intersected with the ongoing financial crisis both at the level of discourse and policy. Similarly, in February 2020, while the Greek government was dealing with the ‘border crisis’, we found ourselves amidst a pandemic

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crisis. For racialized subjects, such as asylum seekers, this ‘crisis within a crisis’ was experienced as what I refer to as ‘detention within detention’. By ‘detention within detention’ I am referring to the way in which quarantine measures create conditions of imprisonment for racialized and illegalized subjects who are placed within already existing situations of containment and imprisonment, including those of actual detention. When Ege was brought to the pre-removal centre PROKEKA of Amygdaleza, he had to remain in the police detention space (‘kratitiria’) of Amygdaleza for a 14-day period of quarantine. During quarantine, he was not permitted to use his mobile phone and was not allowed to exit the ‘kratitiria’ space and go out in the yard. This policy makes it even more difficult to reach a lawyer in order for people who have just been detained to submit within 48 hours after having received their decision (Apofasi) on detention, an appeal against their detention to the Attica Foreigners Division Petrou Ralli. The practice of quarantine, in other words, can result in people missing various deadlines, such as to appeal, apply for asylum or to seek the assistance of a lawyer. It is important to mention that the above ‘Covid-19 measure’ only prolongs the already existing practice of detaining people when they first arrive in Amygdaleza for 48 h in the ‘kratitiria’ within the detention centre, what is being referred to as isolation within administrative detention. When I asked a lawyer who frequently visited his ‘clients’ in Amygdaleza the reasoning for this policy, he told me that they implement it in order to check the behaviour of all newly arrived detainees, in other words, to make sure that they are in a good enough mental state and that they will not cause any issues once they are transferred to the main building of the detention centre. With this practice, the punitive character of administrative detention is revealed as well as the ways in which the pandemic on the pretext of health checks provides the grounds for additional forms of punishment and behavioural control within already existing conditions of detention. I observed, moreover, how nationality matters when it comes to the “waiting game” (Könönen 2019) inside detention. I understood quite quickly that, for example, it is much harder for Pakistanis to challenge their detention order and to be released, even when a Pakistani had a ‘stronger case’ compared to another detainee whose nationality was, for example, Syrian. I knew of Pakistanis who had been living for years in Greece, who had proof of address and no criminal record, but were being released much later (e.g., I knew of Pakistanis that were detained for

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18 months) than Syrians and Moroccans who had been detained on the same day with the Pakistanis. According to an officer that I spoke to from Petrou Ralli, it is much easier, even if it is a time-consuming process, to deport Pakistanis than some other nationalities because Greece has bilateral agreements with Pakistan regarding the return of Pakistani nationals and Petrou Ralli collaborates well with the Pakistani embassy in Athens who is responsible for issuing travel documents for Pakistanis who have received deportation orders. The fact that Pakistanis are more ‘deportable’ results in them being more ‘detainable’ as they are generally kept in detention until the day of their actual deportation. In the Greek jurisdiction, therefore, detention is routinely used to prevent certain migrant nationalities who are deportable from evading their forcible removal by the authorities. “Detention, in this instance, functions and is justified juridically not as punishment for a crime one has already committed, but as a means of prevention of a future crime, such as refusing to be deported” (Spathopoulou et al., forthcoming). In relation to the above, it is important to investigate whether vaccines in pre-removal centres are being used as means with which to enhance deportation, that is, to speed up the deportation process of those subjects that are easily deported. From preliminary research, I discovered that in Amygdaleza those who received vaccine shots (Johnsons and Johnsons one dose) were from countries that people are more easily deported to, such as Albania, Georgia and Pakistan. Pakistan for example, only allows inward travel from the vaccinated population. I noticed how, the vaccine shot formed the final step in the deportation process, as in the case of three detainees it followed their transfer to the Pakistani Embassy where they were identified as Pakistani nationals. This is an inversion of the purpose of vaccines as a means of protecting the population by becoming instead a step towards actual deportation.22 More recently, people who have been released from detention/pre-removal centres on the mainland and who were vaccinated (with one dose) are not being given their vaccination certificate, with the deportation order being the only proof of their identity. People with deportation orders on the mainland and without any proof of vaccination are finding it very hard to exist in the city as during the time of writing most spaces are requiring proof of vaccination and stop and checks by the police have increased dramatically. So, these two 22 More research if, possible, is needed in order to investigate this. Who is getting vaccinated from the refugee population?

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practices of checking one’s legal documents and one’s vaccination status are being implemented interchangeable in the case of racialized populations. I know of people that were released from detention in Athens and who had been vaccinated with one dose. They were finding it very hard to even sit in a restaurant to have a meal without a certificate proof of their vaccination. “The issue was our papers, now the problem is the vaccine paper” is what Kalir told me from Pakistan. I learned that one can go to the KEP to get the vaccination certificate, but this requires that one has a health insurance number (AMKA) or the PAYPA number specifically for asylum applicants, but which is deleted once the asylum process is completed. In addition to this, the people I spoke to and who had recently been released from prolonged detention were reluctant to go to KEP in case the police would stop them and detain them once again. This is fear of visiting municipality centres is not without reason; when Sinan went to KEP in his neighbourhood to ask for a document, it was the KEP personal that called the police who, then detained him in a police station for three months. Since the pandemic outbreak, moreover, detainees in all pre-removal centres are not allowed to accept visitors, even in the outdoor space of the yard where hygiene rules are applicable. People who wanted to bring stuff for their loved ones were forced to wait sometimes for hours at the main gate for the police to come in their car and collect the items. There was a number that you could reach the authorities inside and let them know that we were waiting outside to drop off stuff, that they were many people outside. And even though the time to drop off items was scheduled for everyday between 15:00 and 17:00 and we had informed them of our arrival, seldom did the police come before 17:00 leaving us waiting for two hours. This created a situation of over-crowdedness at Amygdaleza’s entrance, something that contradicts the ongoing references to the pandemic when it comes to various arbitrary policies within detention, such as the ones I mentioned above. I found myself many times in a crowd of people waiting to leave various things for their loved ones. I understood later that it was up to the police that was on duty that specific day to decide what is permitted to be taken inside and what not. Sometimes cash was allowed and sometimes it wasn’t. This was, also, the case with mobile phones. Food was not allowed on the pretext that meals were being provided for the detainees. How many times, I saw people who had to return with all the things that they had brought and would come back the next day to try their luck again. And Amygdaleza was not easy to

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reach from the centre of Athens. From the centre of Athens, you had to change two buses and then walk for half an hour to reach the detention centre, many times, in the rain or under a burning sun. The second bus did not pass frequently and most times you were forced to wait for 1 h before it arrived. To go by taxi costs around 30 euros (two ways) when there is no traffic. From the various discussions that I had with people at the entrance of Amygdaleza it seems that everybody’s experience and connection to this detention centre, including my own, was through a prolong waiting. Waiting for the bus, waiting outside the entrance, often in very harsh weather conditions, waiting for decisions to come out, waiting for lawyers to get back to you, waiting to be released, waiting to be deported, waiting… It felt that the atmospheric violence of waiting-ness that people inside detention succumbed to had overflown the premises and gates of the detention centre and spread all over us, like a virus. It was made clear to us that we were not in control of our time. Encaged agency Through conditions of ‘detention within detention’, Ege and I were not just separated spatially by the walls of the detention centre; we were, also, separated through time, as our sense of time was radically differentiated; for me each day was different, for Ege they were all the same. Peoples’ time inside pre-removal detention centres in Greece is being structured around the three-month extension of their detention that is being written down in the decision paper that they receive from the police. “It is like having a life-threatening illness that you know you are going to die but not the exact day that your life will end. I don’t know when I will be deported which for me means my death”, is what a person detained inside Korinthos pre-removal centre told me. And, for people inside detention and for their loved ones, the figure of the lawyer resembles that of a doctor, as one hangs onto every word they utter and is dependent on their final verdict. But people would reach a point that they could not even trust the lawyer, especially, when they saw promises by lawyers turning into empty words once they received their money. After six months of being in detention and having tried to get out with the assistance of various lawyers, Ege told me that “I must figure my own way out of here. I need to be in control of my life again”. And they were various ways in

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which Ege attempted to regain a sense of control inside detention, by enacting what I refer to here as ‘encaged agency’ (Hage, 2012). Ege refused to accept and sign the decision paper that the police brought to him every three months, and which basically informs him that his detention has been prolonged for another three months. Even if he knows that by not signing and receiving the document, it will not change anything, he insisted to me on the phone that “I will never sign any of their decisions or papers, I know that then they will use my signature to say look his has agreed to be detained, he has agreed to be deported which is not the case. They do not have control over my hand and writing”. Another example is how Ege, like other people in detention that I spoke to, refused to take the rapid covid test in case the authorities were testing him in order to deport him. A few times, Ege asked the policeman on duty to move him to another container because he was having problems with his ‘roommates’. He would insist and have me to call the officer at Amygdaleza to let them know that he is a Baluchi and therefore cannot share the same space with Pakistanis because they were threatening him for being a Baluch. The officer responded laughingly with the following words: “this place is full of Pakistanis, where do you want me to put him”? Eventually, they did move him to a container with Afghanis, “just to keep him quite” as the policeman remarked. It was in such moments, when your request was heard, when your intervention brought a result, when some sort of change took place, even if it was just about moving to a different container that you felt that things were moving, that momentarily you were in control. These were the moments that kept you going, that kept me going. And, hence, my continuous return to the site of detention, where I performed my own spectacle of devotion and loyalty hoping to hear words of gratitude from a person I cared deeply for. As the days turned into weeks and the weeks into months, Ege became obsessed with details and accuracy regarding the movements of people in Athens that he was connected to, specifically their movements/actions towards him. How, in other words, should we be helping him, what we should bring him and when, the specific colour of jumper that we should pick, how often we should come, were issues that shaped our interactions. He would become, moreover, very agitated if we were late, if we had to postpone bringing things for another day because we were busy, if we forgot to bring one item from his long list, if we brought plane crisps instead of flavoured ones. He claimed that we did not care enough that we did not understand him and that we were not doing our best to get

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him out; he didn’t trust us anymore. After a certain point, it felt that Ege was regaining his sense of control over his life and experiences by controlling the way his loved ones were relating to him, that it was up to him, in other words, when we would return and whether we would return again. Which brings us back to the question that I posed at the beginning of this chapter: In situations of transit, what we can refer to in the case of detention, as ‘encaged transit’, how does one experience herself as a migrant, in other words, as underserving and unworthy of anything that can potentially last, including a relationship, friendship or love? How does ‘encaged agency’ turn into ‘harmful agency’ like the one I spoke about in Chapter 7, and vice versa, how does ‘harmful agency’ end up encaging you? Through encaged agency where the self begins to shrink and harmful relationships develop, not only mobility but also our emotions are always in need of mediators, whether it is an NGO, a cultural mediator, weed, a policeman. And, in this way abuse and exploitation of our feelings thrives. Which brings me back to the question: Are we in control of our emotions at the border? As I write the pages of this book, I realized that it was Ege and my own self who had been missing the whole time at and beyond the border and, which permitted, therefore, only spectacles to be played out. At the border where we existed just as categories, only spectacles are played out, not our real feelings, only the spectacle of love, not love. But how and by whom is love being mediated at the border? During one of my visits to Amygdaleza, on an August afternoon of 2020, as I was handing the stuff that I had brought for Ege to the policeman, although I was not expecting any concrete answer, I had asked whether he had any idea when and if Ege would be released. He responded with the following words: “If you love him, he will get out”. Since when is love being mediated by the police? Since when is my love being defined by the police? Why do I need to wait for the police to recognize my love in order for him to be released from detention? These are important questions as they don’t only show us the power of the police, the authorities, the hotspot in deciding whether he or I matter as individuals; that is who is allowed to survive. But most importantly whether being together matters, whether our relationship counts, whether together we are allowed to survive. As Suriya Nayak argues that “the location of ethics within research methodology and writing practices is constituted of what/who is allowed to survive or not which points to an inquiry about conditions of regulation” (2017, p. 206).

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Remember, the Hotspot contains the “power of the erotic” and turns us against each other. I began Chapter 1 with the figure of the police. With the police inviting Karlos to translate at the border. Everything that took place, including my research, unfolded under their gaze. Or almost everything. Not the writing of this book. It becomes, therefore, a political imperative not to end this book with the figure of the police. You don’t have to choose at the border. The worse of you is the best of you. It is love that imprisons you at the border, but it is also love that will set you free. (Notes from my diary, July 2020)

Incomplete Conclusion/Incomplete Return Our differences are huge. But I am prepared to come closer. Our distances are great but I am prepared to travel. We speak different languages. But I am prepared to translate. I am prepared to do all these things and much more…. I am prepared to return and start all over again and again. But I refuse to return to the border. Because you are not just a refugee, and I am not just a researcher. We are and have always been much more…. (Notes written down in February 2022, Edinburgh, Scotland)

That late afternoon on the 25 of June 2020, as I was searching for Ege, in the neighbourhood of Exarchia, I was, also, searching for a story to tell myself about why things could have not been different because of where were located; at the intersection of border and gendered violence.

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I was searching for Ege, in order to challenge his story of what he had become, why he was still in Athens and had not moved on and why I kept returning. But in order to answer these questions I was forced to return, as I am now obligated to return in order to finalize this book; return became my method. And, thus for many years, I can say that I had my own addiction; each time I would say this is the last time and only a few days would pass that my body would turn towards that direction again, towards and back to him. Women always return, they return multiple times to their abuser before leaving for good, is what I have read in relation to what is being referred to as ‘domestic’ violence. Ege was released on the 12 of February 2022. It was the coldest day of the year, with snow everywhere. The roads to Athens had been blocked by the snow, leaving hundreds of drivers that had not been warned by the government to avoid travelling on that day, stranded in their cars in the snow. This led to a public outcry against the Greek government. It was on such an evening that the police decided to release Ege with a paper that said that due to unforeseen circumstances they were not able to deport him and that his deportation has been deferred for six-months. It was also written that if he wished to leave the country, he should reach out to the police or to the IOM who will be willing to help him return to Pakistan. Lastly, it stated that under no circumstances does this paper provide him with the right to remain legally in Greece. “It was like a kind of punishment, letting me and some other guys out in this cold weather”, Ege wrote to me in a message. Ege walked seven hours in the snow and returned to Exarchia. In the meantime, I had left Greece for another island whose borders are being used as means to kill racialized populations and criminalize ‘asylum seekers’ in similar ways as Greece. At the same time, Brexit has turned my current partner into a ‘migrant’ as we seek to build a life together in Scotland. Arriving at the UK border at Edinburgh airport, as we handed our Greek passports, a border guard asked us: Are you returning home? Since we did not hold British passports (I hadn’t renewed mine yet) I knew this was a tricky question, a potential trap within another ‘hotspot minefield’. “We are tourists” I responded, “we have come to visit the Scottish Highlands”. Having gained permission to cross the border (on the condition that we would return back ‘home’), as we exited the airport, I paused for a moment and asked myself: Why do I keep returning to the border? Is it because, after all, the border has become my home?

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Index

A Activist, 6, 16, 19, 42, 45, 56, 64, 66, 71, 82, 92, 94–96, 100–102, 104, 127, 128, 130, 145, 187, 188 Addiction, 154, 193, 208 Aegean Sea, 29, 31, 35 Asylum Seekers, 3, 4, 10, 19, 60, 107, 109, 110, 129, 138, 145, 168, 169, 171, 195–197, 201, 208 Asylum system, 4, 95, 114, 115, 154, 183 Athens, 1–3, 16, 18, 40, 42, 44, 46, 49–51, 55, 57, 59, 62–65, 67, 68, 71, 83, 84, 90, 93, 94, 97, 99, 102–104, 109, 111–114, 116, 117, 120, 121, 123, 131, 133, 135, 137, 144, 147–154, 156, 157, 161–167, 169, 170, 172, 174, 176, 178, 181, 183, 185, 186, 188–192, 194–197, 200, 202–204, 208 Auto-ethnography, 19, 68

Autonomy, 102

B Black Feminist scholarship, 11 Bordered memories, 63 Border islands, 3, 10, 11, 29–32, 36, 38, 40, 41, 45, 54, 55, 60, 63, 84, 111, 118, 122, 145, 179, 181, 185 Border violence, 8–11, 13, 60, 62, 153, 192

C Choice, 12, 13, 32, 34, 35, 45, 54, 62, 67, 77, 109, 151, 153, 154, 164, 171, 194 Control, 4–6, 9, 10, 15, 18, 21, 22, 44, 78, 102, 115, 117, 131, 135, 140, 148, 152, 157, 168, 170, 177, 192–194, 199, 201, 204–206

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Spathopoulou, Bordering and Governmentality Around the Greek Islands, Mobility & Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08589-5

227

228

INDEX

Covid-19 pandemic, 17, 161, 181, 184, 191, 195, 200 Cramped space, 14, 15, 17, 141, 142, 162, 172, 190, 192, 193 ‘Crisis’, 19, 29–31, 33, 41, 56, 67, 68, 74, 76, 77, 88, 97, 99–101, 104, 119, 184, 194 D Deportation, 3, 19, 20, 31, 51, 64, 73, 79, 122, 127, 137, 138, 140, 144–146, 151, 154, 156, 171, 196, 202, 208 Detention, 1, 8, 11, 19, 20, 51, 63, 64, 73, 81, 82, 89, 99, 115, 129, 134, 138, 140, 141, 144–146, 152, 154, 188, 193, 195–206 Drugs, 1, 2, 90, 154, 192, 193, 200 E Economic migrants, 2, 35, 38, 39, 45, 54, 55, 63, 64, 72, 77, 78, 80, 89, 110, 129, 135, 136, 169, 174, 175, 177, 179 Embodiment, 9, 88, 155, 177–179, 181 Engaged Research, 98, 102 The erotic, 88, 96, 103, 104 Europe, 6, 30, 31, 33, 35, 36, 38, 39, 41, 54, 77–80, 82, 90, 91, 95, 99, 107, 109, 110, 113, 118–121, 127, 144, 146, 150, 172, 175, 177, 180, 191 EU-Turkey Deal, 3, 11, 34, 39, 42, 51, 71, 73, 81, 84, 94, 95, 99, 107–111, 126–129, 136, 137, 168, 184, 197 Eviction, 63, 64, 66, 67, 97, 170 F Feminism, 9, 11, 13, 21

Ferries, 37, 43, 72, 111, 112, 138 Fiction, 20 G Gendered violence, 9–11, 19, 20, 126, 140, 207 Greece, 1–7, 11, 13–15, 18, 31, 33, 36, 37, 39, 40, 42, 44, 46, 49–56, 59, 61–63, 65, 68, 72, 74, 78, 82, 88, 89, 99, 102, 107–110, 112, 114–117, 120–123, 126, 129, 132, 134, 136–138, 145, 146, 149, 151, 153, 161, 164, 171–175, 177–180, 183, 184, 192, 194–197, 200–202, 204, 208 H Hotspot, 3, 5–17, 32, 34–37, 39–43, 45, 51, 54–57, 59, 67, 72–82, 87, 89, 90, 92–99, 101, 104, 107, 109–112, 115, 116, 119, 122, 125–130, 132–139, 144–148, 150, 154, 155, 166, 168, 176, 179–181, 183, 186, 191, 195, 197, 200, 206, 207 Hotspot approach, 2, 3, 5–7, 31–33, 41, 45, 78, 87, 118, 119, 180, 181 ‘Hotspotization’, 41, 43, 44 I Immobility, 6, 8, 14, 33, 136, 145, 148 IOM, 34, 116, 120, 121, 151–153, 164–169, 171, 208 L Lesvos, 2, 4, 10, 13, 18, 22, 33, 35, 37–40, 42–44, 46, 50, 51,

INDEX

53–55, 57, 59–64, 67, 71–77, 79, 80, 82–85, 88–92, 94, 95, 97–102, 104, 107, 108, 111, 112, 115, 123, 126–129, 131, 133, 134, 136–140, 142–147, 150, 154, 163, 165, 166, 169, 176, 184, 185, 196, 197, 200 M Masculinity, 61, 62, 78, 80 Mediators, 172, 175, 176, 184, 192, 193, 206 Migrants, 1, 3–6, 8, 12, 14, 15, 17, 19, 20, 34, 35, 38–44, 50, 51, 54–58, 63, 64, 71–82, 84, 88, 89, 91, 92, 94, 97, 99, 101, 107, 108, 110, 113, 115, 116, 119–121, 125, 128, 129, 138, 141, 145, 148, 151, 153, 154, 161, 162, 166, 168–173, 176–179, 181, 185, 187, 189, 192, 193, 195, 196, 199, 202, 206, 208 Migration crisis, 3, 5, 56, 161, 164, 169, 184, 194, 200 Migration management, 4, 7, 18, 20, 31, 36, 41, 72, 78, 82, 154, 171, 196, 200 Mobile hotspot, 13, 14, 112, 117, 161 Mobility, 2, 7–9, 13, 14, 33, 38, 40, 43, 59, 63, 77, 78, 80, 89, 91, 117, 142–144, 148, 162, 171, 172, 196, 206 P Performance, 12, 62, 80, 81, 87, 90, 93 Police, 1, 2, 4, 30, 31, 33, 36–38, 42–44, 49, 51, 55, 57–59, 62, 63, 65, 71, 72, 81, 90, 96, 117,

229

125, 128–130, 132, 137, 140–142, 145, 146, 148, 156, 185, 186, 193, 195–198, 200–204, 206–208 Politics of location, 13, 16, 129 The power of the erotic, 7, 21 Precarious Labour, 173 R Racial profiling, 1, 4, 72, 148, 196 ‘Refugee crisis’, 2, 3, 12, 22, 30, 31, 33, 35, 39, 44, 45, 49, 50, 52, 53, 56, 58, 67, 74, 77, 80, 88, 89, 92, 97, 100–102, 104, 107, 110, 114, 121, 122, 125, 156, 164, 169, 172–174, 176, 177, 179, 180, 183, 193, 194, 200 Refusals, 7, 13, 17, 18, 32, 33, 35, 65, 73, 76, 78, 79, 81, 103, 107, 115, 116, 128, 129, 169, 177 Relocation program, 108, 109, 112–114, 116, 117, 119–121, 137 Researcher, 6, 15, 17, 20, 21, 46, 83, 84, 93, 96–98, 104 Resistance, 11, 17, 92, 101, 130, 193, 194 Return, 3, 5, 6, 15, 22, 36, 40, 46, 51, 52, 65, 68, 79, 83, 84, 97, 98, 100, 102, 112, 115, 116, 123, 128, 129, 144, 147, 151, 167, 181, 184, 191, 197–199, 202, 203, 205, 206, 208 Routes, 2, 12, 14, 19, 33–35, 37, 38, 40–44, 46, 53, 54, 58, 60, 64, 66, 72, 81, 87, 99, 102, 104, 112, 115, 126, 127, 138, 141 S Samos, 2, 13, 18, 29–32, 37–41, 43, 44, 56–58, 60, 61, 71, 72, 79,

230

INDEX

84, 85, 100–102, 108, 128, 129, 135, 137, 138, 140–142, 144–146, 196 Self-harm, 8–10, 15, 20, 22, 147, 151, 153–155, 158, 193 Sexuality, 35, 90, 104 Subjectivities, 13, 17, 80, 81, 88, 104, 143, 161

T Tourist, 6, 38, 39, 50, 52, 90, 104, 195 Transit, 6, 20, 33, 55, 62, 109, 112, 115, 117, 144, 161, 162, 164, 171, 173, 177–179, 192–194, 206 Translation, 17, 20, 31, 44, 57, 95–99, 101–103, 145, 157, 181, 184

U UNHCR, 39, 42, 55, 63, 74, 78, 80, 82, 112, 113, 115, 116, 128, 135, 165, 168, 169, 186, 189 V Volunteer, 6, 19, 20, 37, 42, 45, 52, 54, 56, 60, 66, 73–77, 81, 82, 91–101, 104, 111, 121, 127, 129, 130, 132, 146, 157, 163, 177, 191 W Waiting, 51, 53, 58, 60, 79, 80, 108, 109, 114, 125, 136–138, 152, 156, 165, 194, 203, 204 Writing, 2, 15, 16, 18–22, 66, 81, 83, 102, 174, 183, 185, 186, 202, 206, 207